Ernst Oppler
Ernst Oppler (1867–1929) was a German Impressionist painter and etcher from Hanover. He came from an artistic family: his father was architect Edwin Oppler, and his brothers included the sculptor Alexander Oppler, the physician Berthold Oppler, and the attorney Siegmund Oppler.
He studied at the Munich Academy of Arts and then went to London to learn from James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In 1898 he joined the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers. His early work was naturalistic. In 1901 he painted outdoors in the Netherlands, making refined portraits in subdued tones.
Back in Munich, Oppler joined the Munich Secession. In 1904 Max Liebermann invited him and Lovis Corinth to Berlin, where they joined the Berlin Secession and helped shape German Impressionism. Oppler became a well-known portraitist and also drew, etched, and painted scenes of daily life, city streets, and genres.
He and his brother had studios in Villa Oppler in Berlin-Grunewald and a city apartment on Kurfürstenstraße. Oppler was invited seven times to the Venice Biennale and took part six times. In 1912, after controversy over expressionism, he stopped showing with the Berlin Secession but remained a leading figure of the avant-garde. The German state bought his works for museums as examples of the new wave.
He began attending Russian ballet performances and documenting them, becoming an important chronicler of ballet history in Germany. Ernst Oppler died in Berlin on 1 March 1929. His works are in major German museums like the National Gallery Berlin, the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, and the Lower Saxony State Museum, among others. Outside Germany, his art is in the Appleton Museum of Art, Harvard Art Museums, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Israel Museum, the Ateneum in Helsinki, and the Museum of Modern Art in Venice, among others.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 13:09 (CET).