Hermine Overbeck-Rohte: Hohlweg, 1899, oil on canvas / Hermine Overbeck-Rohte, photography, 1894

You don't give me enough credit for talent! - Hermine Overbeck-Rohte in her time

Hermine Overbeck-Rohte came to Worpswede in 1896 to take painting lessons from Fritz Overbeck. Together with Marie Bock, she is the first female painter in the artists’ village. Just one year later, she married her teacher and from then on struggled to be both: an artist’s wife and a painter. During her first years of marriage, even after the birth of her first child, she created many of her most important works. She had her own studio and worked confidently alongside her husband. But a serious bout of tuberculosis put the brakes on her creativity.

The artist couple left Worpswede in 1905 and moved to Vegesack. Hermine Overbeck-Rohte painted her new surroundings, her own garden and numerous still lifes. However, her illness forced her to return to a long stay in a sanatorium. In 1909, her husband, the painter Fritz Overbeck, died unexpectedly at the age of just 39. Hermine Overbeck-Rohte became the executor of his estate and put her own work aside. It was not until 1991, more than 50 years after her death, that her work was exhibited in public for the first time.