Max Liebermann (1847–1935) was born in Berlin on 20 July 1847 into a wealthy Jewish family; his father was a textile manufacturer who became a banker. After studying in Weimar he spent years in Paris and the Netherlands, where he was influenced by Courbet, Millet and the Barbizon painters. He lived in Munich from 1878 and returned to Berlin in 1884. He painted workers, orphans and peasants, and later beer gardens, beaches and the parks of Berlin, and became the leading German Impressionist.
Liebermann assembled an important collection of French Impressionist paintings himself. In 1897 he was honoured with a solo exhibition at the Prussian Academy of Arts for his fiftieth birthday, and he was elected to the Academy the next year. He was a founder and the first president of the Berlin Secession, the breakaway society that brought German painting into dialogue with modern European art, and led it until 1911. From 1920 he was president of the Prussian Academy of Arts.
In 1933, after the Nazis came to power and the Academy decided to stop exhibiting Jewish artists, Liebermann resigned and withdrew from public life. He died at his home on Pariser Platz in Berlin on 8 February 1935, aged eighty-seven. His villa on the Wannsee has been a museum devoted to his work since 2006.