Max Liebermann: artist, chairman of the Berlin Secession, president of the academy, Prussian, Jew, millionaire heir, "secret emperor of Berlin," "prince of painters" at the Palais am Pariser Platz, and "gardener" at the country house on Lake Wannsee, highly respected, world-renowned, and ultimately defamed and ostracized at the end of his life. The biography of Max Liebermann, the advocate and protagonist of German Impressionism, is as diverse and multifaceted as the circumstances of his nearly 88 years of life. Born in 1847 as the son of a wealthy Jewish textile merchant in Berlin and dying in 1935 after resigning from all public offices at the Palais am Pariser Platz, the artist Max Liebermann embodies a piece of German history from the founding years, reflecting the upheavals, conflicts, struggles, feuds, and triumphs in the quest for art.