The double portrait shows himself and his painting student and later wife Charlotte Berend, who is sitting on his lap with her upper body unclothed and is being embraced by him while he raises a glass.

The painting shows the artist Lovis Corinth and his later wife Charlotte Berend in the form of a portrait of a couple embracing from the front.

Charlotte Berend's upper body is completely bare and her right arm is hanging down, her hand resting on the fabric of the flowing dress around her hips.

His hand, passed under her armpit between her upper arm and ribcage, presses her breast, revealing the nipple between his index and middle fingers.

Berend later described in her memoirs My Life with Lovis Corinth how they both sat closely together on a jetty and she told him the story of her first marriage proposal.

[8] The painting Self-portrait with Charlotte Berend and champagne goblet was created after a short vacation in Tutzing on Lake Starnberg, an "early honey moon",[3] and was regarded by Corinth as an engagement picture.

He painted for a few hours and completed our heads and, like him, I could hardly wait for the next day so that he could continue painting.According to his own statements, Lovis Corinth and Charlotte Berend, who opted for the double name Berend-Corinth, married the following year on March 26, 1903.

According to Carl Georg Heise, he left behind 42 paintings with self-portraits, as well as numerous sketches, drawings and graphic sheets with his portrait.

[15] For the Self-Portrait with Charlotte Berend and Champagne Goblet, Lovis Corinth chose a painting by Rembrandt as his model[10][16]which, according to Beat Wyss, is "abundantly clear".

[3] Sabine Fehlemann, former director of the Von der Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal, also recognizes Peter Paul Rubens as a role model.

[10] Corinth uses the composition and color scheme of Rembrandt's painting, but unlike the latter, he did not depict himself and Charlotte Berend in a biblical or historicizing context, but as erotic[10] and very intimate scene.

Charlotte's shimmering skin takes center stage: the painter presents it to us as if he were King Candaules, who ordered his friend Gyges to hide behind a curtain from where he could admire his magnificent wife.

He managed to formulate his "spectacular works between fleshy female bodies and bloody slaughterhouse scenes" as a response to the "lascivious ambiguity of the salon eroticism of the prudish Wilhelmine era, which in Berlin was rather Anglo-American, puritanically asexual".

He also relates it to Rembrandt's double portrait and writes that "nothing of the Dutchman's bramar-based elation can be found here, but rather an intimacy of feeling that is not diminished by the nudity of the woman, but only heightened.

"[18] He sees here a joie de vivre in the realm of "domestic bliss", underlined by the "sparkling still life" of the table with the fruit and the loosened background.

"The boldness of the motif may have been perceived as provocatively modern at the time of its creation, but for today's viewer, the fluidity of the luminous brushwork reveals a sense of eternity.

[11] Gerhard Leistner described it as a "design of an engagement picture from the man's point of view: the artist in his relationship to and also dependence on the woman as companion, muse and model.

[2] In the contemporary monograph on Corinth from 1913, Georg Biermann described the painting as a "monument" to a "new calm mood that overcomes the artist's work in those moments of domestic happiness".

He wrote: "What appears as a memorable gesture of possession in Titian's Allegory of Avalos, for example, becomes a grasp of the unveiled female breast in Corinth's work.

[20] Fehlemann concentrates on Charlotte Berend, who she perceives as still looking critically and uncertainly towards her fate, "while he is already confidently holding up the champagne goblet at her side".

Charlotte is Corinth's wife and muse and is anchored in this role by him without being additionally encouraged in her own artistic development and career.

Her reserved and shy gaze contrasts with his serious and determined expression and the gesture of holding up the champagne glass, which further emphasizes the "unambiguousness of this connection".

According to the catalog raisonné, it was first owned by the art dealer Oskar Moll in Breslau and later by Werner Rolfes in Frankfurt am Main.

[1] Gert von der Osten wrote in his 1955 biography of Corinth that the whereabouts of the painting were unclear and gave Rolfes as the last known owner in 1926.