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The woman depicted in Eugen Spiro’s painting ‘Lady with a Dog’ (1905) is no stranger. Tilla Durieux, born in Vienna in 1880, was a celebrated actress and political activist. Throughout her career, she was portrayed by famous painters such as Max Slevogt, Lovis Corinth, Oskar Kokoschka and many others. In 1905, when this painting was created, she was married to the painter Eugen Spiro in her first marriage. However, in the same year she met the Berlin gallery owner Paul Cassirer, whom she married in 1910.
Spiro, born in Breslau in 1874, after a brief apprenticeship at a Breslau-based ladies’ clothing firm, studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Arts and Crafts in Breslau from 1892 to 1894, before transferring to the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. There he became a pupil of Franz von Stuck, who declared him his master pupil in 1897 and gave him a studio in the Villa Stuck. In 1900 he became a member of the Munich Secession. In 1904 he moved to Berlin, where, in the same year, he met Durieux, whom he painted in several portraits. As a member of the executive committee of the Berlin Secession, Spiro gained social recognition, which led to his appointment to the acquisitions committee of the Berlin National Gallery in 1924.
Spiro’s painting shows influences from Art Nouveau, Symbolism, French Impressionism and the portraiture of the Berlin Secessionists. Before the First World War, he maintained contacts with the German artists’ circle ‘Café du Dôme’ in Paris and met Hans Purrmann. As a Jew in Germany, he was eventually forced to emigrate and found refuge in New York. Much of his work, as well as his art collection, was lost. Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann supported him in his new home. When Spiro died there in 1972 at the age of 98, his contribution to German Impressionism had been all but forgotten.