Corinth studied painting at the Konigsberg Academy with Qtto Gunther and then at Munich with Ludwig von Lofftz, but received his main training in Paris, where he stayed from 1884 to 1887. He worked at the Academie Juliian and was a pupil of Bouguereau and Robert Fleury, who introduced him to the Flemish painters, Frans Hals and Rembrandt. He was enthusiastic about Millet and realism, but so far he had made no contact with the Impressionists. When he returned to Konigsberg (1887-1891) he worked hard to acquire his powerful realistic, very individual style, expressing himself in landscapes, portraits and still lifes, which he painted better than anything else: he also painted mythological and religious scenes. In 1890 he obtained an honourable mention for his painting The Body of Christ at the Paris Salon. The following year he went to Munich and there painted mainly nudes and portraits, and also attempted some large-scale religious paintings. In 1895 he sold a picture for the first time a Descent from the Cross. After 1900 he lived in Berlin and joined the Sezession movement which had been founded ten years previously by Franz von Stuck, Wilhelm Trubner and Fritz von Uhde, as a reaction against the academic style of painting then prevalent in Germany. In 1901 he married Charlotte Barend, who was his pupil and twenty-three years younger, and who became his favourite model. Together with Max Slevogt, Corinth became one of the chief Berlin Impressionist, and experimented especially with light effects. He began to use fragmentation, and his palette
gradually became richer and more brilliant without losing its depth of tone.  After the bath (1906), View from the studio in Munich, Emperor's Day at Hamburg (1911) are examples of his style at the time. In 1911 he had a stroke which left him physically incapacitated at first, but his energy helped him to make a good recovery and in that same year he painted more than sixty canvases in a rather different and more sensual style than before, where his material is more important than the subject, and he seeks to merge his spaces into powerful sweeps of colour. He was an indefatigable traveller and visited Italy, France, Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands. After 1918 he spent his summers in Bavaria, at Urfeld on the Walchensee, and the lakeside there appears in several of his paintings. Towards the end of his life he gave up his Impressionist technique and adopted a more violent style and more intense tones anticipating Expressionism. Corinth died in 1925 during a last visit to Holland to see the works of Frans Hals and Rembrandt. His fame increased after his death up to the corning of Nazism, when most of his work was rejected as being subversive and decadent, and a good number
of his paintings in German museums were then sold. Corinth was a complicated, unconventional personality and never really attached himself to any movement. His work centres on his love of nature which he calls 'our master, guide and comfort during the many dark hours of our life'.

Based on Phaidon encyclopedia of Impressionism, Maurice Serullaz, Phaidon, 1978