The collection of works from the 19th and 21st centuries in the Painting Gallery firstly concentrated on works by Darmstadt and Hessian painters. They were permanently on show in the Painting Gallery until the Second World War, after which they were only exhibited individually. But now they have a firm place in the new permanent presentation, where they are on display in a gallery of their own. Hessian and Darmstadt painting is particularly distinctive in the first half of the 19th century, at the threshold between Romanticism and Realism, a time when landscape painting and the bourgeoisie portrait blossomed. The influence of the plen air painting, which became widespread in Germany, and realism manifests itself in the second half of the century.
The collection secondly focuses on major German painters of the second half of the century. Highlights include works by the Symbolist Franz von Stuck, English Victorian painters like John William Waterhouse as well as the famed »Iphigenia« (1862) by Anselm Feuerbach. The fourteen paintings by Arnold Böcklin with the large-scale »Prometheus Landscape« (1885) make up the largest collection in a German museum.
The collection’s third focus is devoted to Expressionism and New Objectivity features works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, August Macke and Lyonel Feininger. This group is round off by Max Beckmann’s final painting, »View of San Francisco« (1950).
Painting and Sculpture 19th and 20th Century
Anselm Feuerbach: Iphigenie, 1862
