Max Liebermann - Portrait of the surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch (1875-1951) - Study. Oil on canvas. (1932). Approx. 75.5 x 60 cm. With the signature stamp used by the estate at the bottom left (Lugt 4763). Inscribed on the verso of the canvas "42". - One of the last portraits of the great portraitist Max Liebermann - Expressive, independent study to the portrait in the Hamburg Kunsthalle - Ferdinand Sauerbruch is one of the most important surgeons of the 20th century In 1932, the already very old Max Liebermann paints his last large portraits. In the spring he creates the 'Portrait of the Surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch', which is now in the Hamburger Kunsthalle. In preparation for it, Liebermann made two oil studies. The one offered here is probably the first of the two: the white doctor's coat does not yet cast the characteristic angular fold over his right shoulder and the back of the chair ends in a steep, carved knob. When Ferdinand Sauerbruch moved from Munich to Berlin in 1928, he acquired a house in her neighborhood in Berlin-Wannsee through the mediation of art collector and patron Margarete Oppenheim. He met the painter Max Liebermann, also a neighbor at Wannsee, a short time later at an evening party in the Oppenheim house. Sauerbruch became a close friend of the painter and his family, and his son became Liebermann's student. Father and son Sauerbruch are also among the few intrepid people who publicly pay their last respects to Liebermann at his funeral in 1935. "In his memoirs, the surgeon reports that Liebermann had contracted a dangerous hernia. Thereupon he had him taken immediately to the Charité. On this occasion Liebermann drew him. At his own request, he hung the almost 85-year-old patient by his legs - the hernia corrected itself in this way. After a few days, the artist was well again and, back in Wannsee, began to work on a portrait of the surgeon: 'A few days later, he explained to me that I now had to sit for him. I did, but then it took too much time away from me, and I grumbled. He, however, said: 'Et jeht ja mal n anders. If you make a mistake, the next day the lawn will cover it. But a mistake of mine will be hanging on the wall for a hundred years. So he painted me in oil (...). First he made a large oil sketch, then he started again. The finished picture he called 'The Surgeon' and exhibited it. (...) He finished the sketch and gave it to me.'" (Matthias Eberle, Max Liebermann, Munich 1996, vol. 2, p. 1232). Erich Hancke, Liebermann's executor, deviates from this in a report from 1946, assuming that the portrait was painted without a session, but primarily after portrait photos by Rudolf Großmann. The portrait of the surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch was enthusiastically received by critics at the first exhibition in May 1932 and celebrated as one of the great achievements of the artist. "Max Liebermann paints the great surgeon in a completely unbiased manner. (...) The spiritual head looks at us inquiringly from the bright eyes, through the glasses, the lights of the forehead of the head gently tilted to the right are plastically spatulated out, as are the lights of the clasped, finely nerved hands. The background is very bright and sprays with delicate flecks of yellow, green and red. It is truly a wonder with what inner vehemence the eighty-five year old shapes his 'model' here." (Adolph Donath, Liebermann Portraits. The exhibition at the Künstlerhaus, in: Berliner Tageblatt, 10.5.1932, p. 3). Ferdinand Sauerbruch (1875 Barmen - Berlin 1951) is considered one of the most important and influential surgeons in the 1st half of the 20th century. As a physician, professor and clinic director, he first worked in Breslau, Zurich and Munich. In 1928, he was appointed to the Berlin Charité and was director of the Surgical University Clinic there until his retirement in 1949. Sauerbruch is world-famous, especially for his research in the field of chest surgery in negative pressure chambers (thoracic surgery). His military hospital work as a medical officer in World War I prompted him to invent the "Sauerbruch arm," a special movable arm prosthesis for war casualties. Sauerbruch's professional reputation and medical innovations are undisputed; he treated and operated on everyone without distinction or judgment. But his person is rather ambivalent in the time of National Socialism. In 2019, the Berlin Medical History Museum of the Charité organized the comprehensive exhibition "On a Knife's Edge. The surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch between medicine and myth." Eberle 1932/1. exhibition: Galerie Ludorff, Düsseldorf fall 1990, stock catalog 58, with col. Fig. p. 67; Liebermann, La Malmaison, Cannes 1996, with col. Fig. p. 32; Liebermann, Cranach Gallery, Luthersta