The Liebermann Portrait That Never Came Home

In The Hague, at the Mesdag Museum, there is a painting by Max Liebermann. It is an oil portrait of a bald, heavyset man in a dark suit, seated in a wooden chair, arms folded. He has a small moustache and he is looking at something slightly to the left of the viewer — not quite meeting the eye. Liebermann signed it in the top right corner, in the cramped hand he used in old age, and dated it 1927. The subject is August Weber, my great-grandfather.

I have never seen it in person.

Portrait of August Weber by Max Liebermann, 1927. Oil on canvas. Mesdag Museum, The Hague.

This piece grew out of an article I wrote about August Weber himself — his life in Weimar finance and politics, his years of arrest and removal under the Nazis, and his exile to London. The portrait appears there, briefly, as one of the things that didn't follow him out of Germany. Writing that piece made clear it had its own story. This is that story.

The painter

By 1927, Max Liebermann was the most celebrated living German artist — president of the Berlin Secession, founder of the German Impressionist movement, a figure of such institutional weight that the Prussian Academy of Arts had been built around him. His sitters over the decades had included Albert Einstein, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Paul von Hindenburg. He was also Jewish, Berliner, and eighty years old, and the world that had made him its centre was four years from ending.

To be painted by Liebermann in 1927 was a statement. It placed August Weber in a particular tradition of Weimar portraiture — cultured, liberal, civic — at the precise moment that tradition was coming under the most sustained attack it had faced. The two men knew each other through overlapping circles: the Berlin intelligentsia, the professional life of a city in which a progressive banker and a progressive painter moved through the same rooms. August's wife Maria came from a family that had grown up near Liebermann's own; her mother had known him since childhood.

The portrait was completed in six sittings in Liebermann's studio. Jan Webber, my grandfather, was ten years old and remembered the sessions clearly. August told the family about conversations with Liebermann during the sittings. One exchange he repeated: August had offered the opinion that Liebermann's portrait of Chancellor von Bülow had not been a success. Liebermann replied: "I couldn't stand the man."

Max Liebermann at his villa in Wannsee, c. 1927 — the year he painted August Weber's portrait. © Max-Liebermann-Gesellschaft.

The estate

After the sittings, the portrait hung in August's study at the Domäne Löpten — the estate south of Berlin that the family had occupied since 1920. Löpten was the centre of their life during the Weimar years: a house with sixteen rooms, surrounded by workers' cottages August had built, a village he had brought electricity to, land he farmed at a loss because the sandy Brandenburg soil wouldn't turn a profit. Jan grew up there. In his memory, the portrait was simply part of the house — above a desk, in a room his father worked in, the way portraits are when they have always been there.

They left Löpten in 1933. The Nazis came to power and August was arrested within weeks, at the instigation of the Nazi Gauleiter of Saxony. The sequence of removals followed: board memberships, associations, income, the estate itself. The family relocated to an apartment in the Mommsenstraße in Charlottenburg. At some point after the first arrest — Jan believed it was around then — his parents began discussing what could be protected, and how.

Grete Ring and the Amsterdam route

The person who solved the problem of the portrait was Grete Ring. She was a childhood friend of August's wife Maria, a niece of Liebermann, an art historian by training, and since 1924 a partner in the Berliner Kunsthändlerfirma Paul Cassirer — the most significant art dealership in Germany, the gallery that had represented Liebermann for decades and whose Amsterdam branch had been operating since 1923. Ring was the kind of person who knew how to move things.

Grete Ring, portrait by the Secession artist Dora Hitz, c. 1900. Ring was Liebermann's niece by marriage, a partner in the Paul Cassirer gallery, and the person who arranged for the Weber portrait to leave Germany. © Liebermann-Villa am Wannsee

The portrait left Germany through the Cassirer network and was brought to Amsterdam, where it was placed with the Rijksmuseum for safekeeping. The logic was straightforward. Holland was neutral, stable, and outside the Reich. The Rijksmuseum was one of the great European institutions. If anything could be kept safe, it was this.

There was also a particular resonance to the choice of country. Liebermann had spent nearly every summer in the Dutch countryside for decades, painting farm workers, fishing villages, and the flat northern light that had shaped his early work. Of all the places outside Germany, Holland was the one he knew best.

The Cohn family — August's in-laws, Maria's parents — used the same Cassirer connections when they fled Germany in 1933, to sell a painting of their own: a portrait of a thirteen-year-old Maria Cohn by the Swedish artist Anders Zorn, painted in 1900. The painting ended up in a private collection in Sweden — Maria Weber Steinberg, August's daughter, traced it there in the 1990s. The family's instinct was consistent — when you had to leave, you found ways to preserve what you could, by whatever channels were still open.

Maria Cohn, aged thirteen, by Anders Zorn, 1900. The subject became Maria Weber, August's wife. The portrait is the centrepiece of Erika Esau Boeck's account of Maria's life.

Liebermann's end

In May 1933, Liebermann resigned the honorary presidency of the Prussian Academy of Arts. He was eighty-five. The alternative was expulsion. He did not attend another public event. Watching Nazi columns march past his window, he told those who visited him: »Ich kann gar nicht soviel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte« — I cannot eat as much as I would like to puke. He died on 8 February 1935, in Berlin, in his house on the Pariser Platz — two years before his work was formally classified as entartet and removed from public collections.

His wife Martha was still alive when the war began. She stayed in the house. On 5 March 1943, she was notified that she would be deported. She was eighty-five. That evening, she took an overdose of Veronal. Police arrived to collect her and found her in a coma. She survived five more days and died on 10 March 1943 at the Jewish Hospital in Berlin.

After her death, the Reich confiscated the Liebermann estate.

The man who had painted August Weber's portrait at the height of both their lives had ended this way. His wife had chosen the terms of her own death rather than accept what the state had arranged for her.

Martha Liebermann in the garden at Wannsee, 1927. She was 85 when the Nazi authorities ordered her deportation in March 1943. Photograph: W. v. Debschitz-Kunowski, Berlin. © Max-Liebermann-Gesellschaft

May 1940

When Germany invaded the Netherlands, the portrait had been in Amsterdam for the better part of a decade. By then August was in London — he had left Germany in February 1939, via Holland, with 27 Marks. Maria had left the month before. Their children were dispersed: Jan in England, the twins in Switzerland.

The Dutch surrender was signed on 15 May 1940. Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who had overseen the Anschluss and assisted with the art looting of Poland, was appointed Reich Commissioner for the occupied Netherlands. Among the people he brought with him was Kajetan Mühlmann.

The Dienststelle Mühlmann

Mühlmann was an Austrian art historian with a doctorate from the University of Vienna and a career that had run through the German security apparatus since the 1930s. In Poland he had directed the systematic confiscation of cultural property. In Holland, he established the Dienststelle Mühlmann — his agency, headquartered at the Sophialaan in The Hague — which operated as a clearing house for art seized from Jews and other enemies of the Reich, and as a procurement operation for senior Nazi officials including Hitler and Göring.

The Dienststelle specifically targeted the property of German Jews who had fled to Holland after 1933. This was a known pattern, tracked by a network of informants. A postwar intelligence report on the operation documented one example by name: "The storage of the Jewish Berlin collection of Dr. Jaffé in the Museum at Leiden, through confidential information from private quarters in Germany, led to the seizure of the large collection, owner of which had emigrated to England." Émigré collections placed in Dutch institutions for safekeeping were not harder to find. They were easier.

In 1942, the Liebermann portrait was taken by the Mühlmann operation in The Hague and classified as German property.

Mühlmann was arrested by the US Army in 1945, gave testimony to the Office of Strategic Services, and in 1947 escaped Allied custody during a hospitalisation. He died in Munich in 1958 — one year after August Weber.

The silence

August made inquiries after the war. Holland told him the painting could not be found. It wasn't found during his lifetime.

He died in London on 8 November 1957. He was eighty-six.

Jan wrote about all of this in 1997, in an essay called Geschichte und Geschichten: Weber und Liebermann, published in Berlin by Edition Luisenstadt. By then, he wrote, the portrait had resurfaced — identified first at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, then transferred to the Mesdag Museum in The Hague. He ends the piece with a single sentence: "My sisters and I hope that it will return to our family's possession in the foreseeable future."

That was twenty-eight years ago.

What remains open

Maria Weber Steinberg — August's daughter, one of the twins sent to Geneva in 1933 when she was fourteen — died on 7 July 2013 in Los Angeles. She had become a mathematician, settled in California, and worked as a volunteer at LACMA into her late eighties. Among the things she kept at her home in Pacific Palisades was a small drawing of her father by Liebermann. Not the portrait. A drawing. When she had gone back to Löpten in the 1970s — the estate was in East Germany by then — she found the old servants living in the house. As far as anyone close to her knew, the family received no compensation for any of it: not the estate, not the apartment and its contents, not the portrait.

The Dutch Restitutiecommissie, the committee established in 2001 to handle claims for looted art in Dutch public collections, has processed around 170 cases. Between 2011 and 2015, the Van Gogh Museum Foundation and the Netherlands Institute for Art History conducted systematic provenance research on the Mesdag Collection. Whether a restitution claim has ever been filed for this painting, and what came of it, I have not been able to establish. No public decision exists in the available record.

One complication is the portrait's wartime legal classification. Because August had fled to London and was a known political opponent of the regime, his Dutch-held property was designated Feindvermögen — enemy assets — rather than Jewish-owned property seized under racial laws. This placed it on a different legal footing: the postwar Dutch state categorised it as German property, not as stolen goods. The portrait remains part of the NK-collectie — the Dutch national inventory of wartime acquisitions that were never returned to their owners — a category that runs to more than four thousand objects.

In 2025, the Restitutiecommissie concluded a case involving a separate Liebermann drawing, traced through Martha Liebermann's estate. The committee found in favour of restitution. The Weber portrait has not appeared in any published decision.

The portrait is at the Mesdag Museum. As of this writing, that is what is known.

The Mesdag Museum (Museum Mesdag), The Hague, where the portrait currently hangs as part of the NK-collectie.

A note on the painting itself

Liebermann was eighty when he painted August Weber. He worked quickly — six sittings, Jan said. Looking at the portrait, you can see something that isn't present in the formal photographs of either man: a quality of ease, a subject who is sitting for someone he knows rather than performing for an institution. August doesn't look triumphant. He looks like a person at rest, briefly, in the middle of a life that isn't finished.

He was fifty-six. He had sixteen more years of whatever was coming.

Sources

• Jan Webber, Geschichte und Geschichten: Weber und Liebermann, Edition Luisenstadt, Berlin, 1997. berlingeschichte.de
• Erika Esau Boeck, A side. Maria's story, esauboeck.wordpress.com, 2014. esauboeck.wordpress.com
• Max Liebermann — Wikipedia
• Martha Liebermann — Wikipedia
• Kajetan Mühlmann — Wikipedia
• Paul Cassirer — Wikipedia
• Jan Vlug, Report on Objects of Art and Science Removed from Holland by the German Occupation Authorities, Dutch Intelligence Service, 25 December 1945. lootedart.com
• Maria-Anita Ronchini, How the Nazis Looted Art in the Netherlands: Dienststelle Mühlmann, TheCollector, 2024. thecollector.com
• Restitutiecommissie — History
• Restitutiecommissie, Recommendation regarding a Liebermann drawing, 2025. restitutiecommissie.nl
• Max Liebermann — Liebermann-Villa am Wannsee. liebermann-villa.de
• The Mesdag Collection — Wikipedia