Bathing Boys With Crab Fisherman 

Max Liebermann’s painting, Bathing Boys with Crab Fisherman, is a work in oil paint, applied with brisk, visible strokes. Liebermann’s quick, impressionistic technique has real significance here. It conveys the immediacy of experience, but also hints at the changing social landscape of leisure. He wasn’t grinding his own pigments, but buying them ready-made; manufactured colours allowed a new speed of working. The painting is thinly applied, and the rough canvas shows through, revealing the material support of the work. This wasn’t just a question of taste: as urban life accelerated, and as the middle class came to define itself through recreation, the art world responded. Liebermann's way of painting is a document of its time. In its apparent casualness, we see both a visual record and a set of social relationships in action. It reminds us that paintings, just like any other designed object, are made from stuff, by someone, for a reason.