Lovis Corinth

Lovis Corinth was born Franz Heinrich Louis Corinth on 21 July 1858 in Tapiau, East Prussia, now Gvardeysk, Russia. He trained at the Academy of Konigsberg beginning in 1876, studied in Munich from 1880 to 1884, spent a brief period in Antwerp in 1884, and closed his formal training that same year at the Academie Julian in Paris.

He built his early reputation in Munich before settling in Berlin, where he became a leading figure of German Impressionism and later served as president of the Berlin Secession from 1915 to 1925. His style shifted over the course of his career, moving from dense, academically grounded realism toward looser, more expressive brushwork. He represented German painting at the Venice Biennale in 1922 and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Konigsberg in 1921.

Corinth died in July 1925 in Zandvoort, Netherlands, of pneumonia contracted during a trip to Holland. English and German language sources most often cite 17 July 1925 as the date of death, while Britannica gives 12 July 1925. The year, place, and cause of death are consistent across all sources consulted, though the exact day remains unresolved.

Critics and museums have long treated Corinth as a hinge figure in German art. Reviewing the artist's 1964 retrospective in New York, critic Hilton Kramer positioned Corinth as a figure whose late work carried nineteenth century tradition into the modern era; the exact wording of that review could not be confirmed against a primary source for this profile. Later museum presentations, including exhibitions at Tate in London in 1958 to 1959 and again in 1997, and reviews of Alte Nationalgalerie programming in Berlin, have continued to frame him as a transitional figure between nineteenth century naturalism and the Expressionist movements that followed him in Germany.

Corinth's work appears at major auction houses, and secondary market guides describe a wide price range, from roughly EUR 10 for minor graphic works to just over EUR 1.1 million for his strongest paintings, with the 1922 landscape Walchensee, mit aufgehendem Mond (Walchensee, with rising moon) cited as reaching that top figure. Current research could not independently confirm the auction house, city, or exact sale date behind that result, so it should be treated as an approximate benchmark rather than a verified record until it is checked against primary auction house catalogues.

No catalogue raisonne could be confirmed for Corinth in current research. Authentication references instead point to the Galerie St. Etienne and Kallir Research archives as the field's primary scholarly resources, so collectors should expect provenance and exhibition history to carry more weight than a single centralized authentication registry. Because the exact house, city, and date behind the highest cited auction price could not be verified from more than one source, collectors should treat headline market figures for this artist with some caution until they are checked against primary auction house records. His deep museum presence across Europe and the United States remains the more durable signal of his standing.