Self-Portrait

1888–1889

Munich: lessons with Herterich and the realisation that she is a draughtsman

In Munich she studied painting with Ludwig Herterich and realised that her strength lay not in painting but in drawing.

1888–1889

Engagement to Karl Kollwitz

While studying art in Munich she became engaged to Karl Kollwitz, to whom her brother had introduced her.

1890

Back in Königsberg: her first studio

In 1890 she returned to Königsberg, rented her first studio and went on depicting the harsh labour of the working class, a subject that inspired her work for years.

1891

Marries the physician Karl Kollwitz

She married Karl Kollwitz, a doctor who tended the poor of Berlin; the couple moved into a large apartment that remained her home until it was destroyed in the Second World War. Her husband’s nearby practice supplied motifs from the lives of workers, which, in her own words, she found beautiful.

13. Juni 1891

Married: Karl Kollwitz

1892–1896

Hauptmann’s “The Weavers” inspires a new cycle

Between the births of her sons Hans and Peter she saw Gerhart Hauptmann’s play The Weavers, about the failed revolt of the Silesian weavers in Langenbielau in 1844. It inspired her to drop a series of etchings she had planned to illustrate Émile Zola’s Germinal and to produce a cycle on the weavers instead.