Realism Abroad

Wilhelm Leibl

Three Women in Church

1878–82

Oil on mahogany panel, 113 × 77 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle

A young woman and two older ones sit in a pew in a Bavarian village church, one praying, two reading their prayer books.

• Leibl worked on it for some three and a half years inside the church, very close to his models.
• Look at the detail: embroidered clothes, rough hands, dust on the carved pew.
• Real country women in an upright, altar-like format that honors Holbein; the museum calls it a main work of Realism.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain