Study of a head of a bavarian man

Born in a small Bavarian village near Munich, Hubert Herkomer emigrated with his family to America in 1851, but returned to Europe to settle in England in 1857. He received a rudimentary training from his father, a woodcarver, and studied briefly at the Akademie in Munich and the South Kensington Schools in London. Herkomer began his career as an illustrator, providing a series of scenes of contemporary urban and rural life for The Graphic magazine throughout the 1870s; popular images that first established his reputation. Herkomer’s earliest independent paintings were genre scenes – both of London and Bavarian subjects - and portraits, and soon earned him considerable success. He made his home in the town of Bushey in Hertfordshire in 1873, establishing his studio there, and in 1883 he founded an art school in the town, attracting a large number of artists to the area. From 1870 he would also spend several months each year in Germany, becoming friendly with such artists as Adolph von Menzel. Elected to the Royal Academy in 1890, Herkomer exhibited there regularly, and also showed at the Grosvenor Gallery and the New Gallery in London, as well as in Paris, Vienna, Munich, Berlin and Hamburg. An excellent portraitist, he depicted many of the most eminent persons of the day, including fellow artists such as John Singer Sargent and John Ruskin, whom he succeeded as Slade Professor at Oxford in 1885. Between 1882 and 1883 and again in 1885 and 1886 he spent several months in America, where he received several significant portrait commissions. By the turn of the century Herkomer was firmly established as one of the most famous painters of the Victorian era, and a celebrity in both England and Germany. Knighted in England in 1907, Herkomer published his memoirs in 1910, four years before his death. Although best known today as an artist, Herkomer was also a musician and composer, a pioneering filmmaker - producing costume dramas accompanied by his own music - and a motor racing enthusiast.
Herkomer painted genre scenes of Bavarian peasants throughout his career. He produced several drawings of Bavarian and Alpine scenes for The Graphic magazine in the 1870s, and his first major exhibited painting, After the Toil of the Day, shown at the Royal Academy in 1873, was set in the village of Garmisch in the Bavarian Tyrol. In November 1885 he exhibited a group of watercolours, drawn at Ramsau in Bavaria earlier that year, at the Fine Art Society in London, under the title Life and Work in the Bavarian Alps.
Among stylistically comparable watercolours by Herkomer is a study of An Old Bavarian Peasant Woman in the collection of the Ulster Museum in Belfast.