Drawn to the subject matter and ethics of recent French art, Liebermann set off for Paris and Barbizon in 1874. There he wanted above all to be near Jean-François Millet (1814-75), who, however, refused all contact with Germans in the immediate aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war. Following Millet’s example, Liebermann focused in Barbizon on the life and work of common people in the country, as is evident in works like the Potato Harvest in Barbizon of 1875.

During this period the Dutch old masters exerted a lasting influence on Liebermann’s paintings. In particular the art of Frans Hals (b. c. 1580-85, d. 1866), whose works Liebermann copied by the dozen in Haarlem, made a strong impression. Holland became the artistic home of the Berlin painter. Up until 1914 when the outbreak of World War I made traveling all but impossible, Liebermann spent several months there nearly every summer.

In 1878, Liebermann moved to Munich where he came into contact with the artists’ circle around Wilhelm leibl (1844-1900) to which Wilhelm Trübner, Carl Schuch, Theodor Alt, Karl Haider and for a time, Hans Thoma, belonged.  Liebermann’s intense preoccupation with motifs of the common tradespeople and farm laborers he encountered in Holland earned him the name of  “poor people painter”, a phrase coined by the Berlin art critic Ludwig Pietsch of the Vossische Zeitung. In 1884, the year his Munich Beer Garden was received enthusiastically in Paris, Liebermann returned to Berlin and in September married Martha Marckwald. The honeymoon was spent – where else – in Holland. In the summer of 1885 the couple’s only child, their daughter Käthe, was born.

Max Liebermann gradually won recognition as an artist in his home town. He was one of the first, in the nationalistically charged atmosphere of those years, to take an interest in the French Impressionists and to collect their work. His participation in the Paris World’s Fair of 1889, which commemorated the 100^th anniversary of the French Revolution and included among other things a comprehensive exhibition of European art, was a huge success. Max Liebermann had submitted his painting, The Netmenders, and was to be awarded the title of Knight of the Legion of Honor. However, the artist abided by the Prussian government’s injunction forbidding him, for political reasons, to accept the honor.

After the death of his father in 1894 Max Liebermann inherited the house on Pariser Platz where he had been living since 1892. The painter now enjoyed the address later eulogized as “just on the right as you enter Berlin”. In September 1899 he was able to move into his newly built rooftop studio. In the meantime, Liebermann had published a study on Jozef Israels, the first of a long series of writings on art. He had also been elected president of the newly founded Berlin Secession. He became known as one of the triumvirate of so-called German Impressionists alongside Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt. At this time both his subject matter and painting style began to change. He no longer painted scenes of the common laborer but instead addressed the world of the upper middle classes. During the summer months Liebermann painted beach and equestrian pictures at the North Sea resort Nordwijk, while in Berlin he became a much sought after portrait painter. Among his earliest portraits are those of the playwright Gerhart Hauptmann and the director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Wilhelm von Bode. By that time Max Liebermann had become an institution. He was often quoted and his sayings were even recorded and collected as anecdotes. He was admired, envied and revered.
 

Following the outbreak of the first world war, Liebermann no longer traveled abroad. He moved into his summer house at Wannsee in 1910 and its splendid garden became his most important subject. In over 200 works he captured this small private paradise from ever changing viewpoints. In 1920 Liebermann accepted an appointment as president of the Prussian Academy of Arts (Preußische Akademie der Künste) and held this position until 1933. The Academy of Arts was the cultural center of Berlin and Liebermann’s post there possibly the most important in the Berlin art arena. In his long tenure he established for younger generations a setting conducive to new developments, even though he did not always appreciate these. Up until the National Socialists came into power, Max Liebermann was honored in many ways, showered with orders and medals and in 1927 named Honorary Citizen of the City of Berlin. All the more tragic in this light was his fate after 1933 when Max Liebermann had no choice but to resign from his honorary presidency of the Academy of Arts. That same year he painted a self-portrait in oil in which he depicts himself holding a brush in his hand.  His bearing is concentrated and suggests neither desperation nor helplessness but rather an inner seclusion. Max Liebermann died ostracized by the National Socialists, lonely and embittered, on February 8, 1935 in Berlin.