Skull with Shroud
Hans Thoma
Hans Thoma the museum director
Is this a thought-provoking wake-up call or just a macabre student joke?
Rendered as a classic portrait, the skull in this work by Wilhelm Leibl seems to gaze out at the viewer from its empty eye sockets.
With a white cloth loosely wrapped around it, the bare skull is set against a dark background. The skull’s teeth stand out prominently, even though some are missing in the upper jaw. A dark hole marks where the nose would have been.
Leibl as a student in Munich
Wilhelm Leibl was born in Cologne. When he painted the work on show here, he was 24 years old and had already been studying at Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts for around five years. The close friends he made there included Rudolf Hirth du Frênes, Theodor Alt and Johann Sperl. They worked intensely together, practising by copying Old Master paintings in the Pinakothek collections, making portraits of each other and sharing models for figure drawing. This period not only produced the obligatory studies based on 17th-century works in Dutch art, but also such paintings as Leibl’s bizarre skull.
The portrayal of death in art
After all, from the mid-19th century on, students at art academies were often given the skull as a subject for an assignment. This was, though, a practice some contemporaries condemned. The French poet Jules Laforgue, for instance, found the number of skulls in works by students at Berlin’s Academy of Art quite inappropriate. Yet even then depictions of skulls in art had a long tradition.
The Dance of Death was the most common medieval motif reminding beholders of the transitory nature of their lives. In the Baroque era, the genre of painting known as a vanitas still life became popular. Such works depicted a draped lifeless object, usually accompanied by a skull or other symbols of mortality intended to remind viewers of the fragility of human existence.
Yet despite its allusion to death, Leibl’s painting is neither a Dance of Death nor a vanitas still life. Most likely, then, this is an ironic macabre study, created as a studio joke or as part of a task assigned by an Academy teacher.
A skull for the Kunsthalle
While staying in Munich in the early 1870s, Hans Thoma also met Wilhelm Leibl. In those days, Leibl was the centre of a group of artists known as the “Leibl circle”, which Thoma also joined for some time. Certainly, Leibl’s Skull with Shroud is known to have been part of Thoma’s private collection for many years. Perhaps Leibl himself even gave it to Thoma during his time in Munich? In 1904, Hans Thoma donated the painting to the Kunsthalle.
Basic data
| Title | Skull with Shroud |
|---|---|
| Artist | Wilhelm Leibl |
| Date | 1868 |
| Measurements Plastic | H 43cm W 35.5cm |
| Material | Oil on board |