Portrait of Marianne Brockhaus in Leipzig

Otto Greiner favored esoteric themes drawn from dreams, the unconscious, and a timeless classical past. Early on, he apprenticed with a lithographer, giving him proficiency in printmaking that was well-suited to experimentation. Here, Greiner portrayed Marianne Brockhaus, an influential collector of both artworks and books—a practice that was, in her time, still unusual for a woman. Her distant gaze and finger holding her place in a book suggest her intellectual interests, while her precisely rendered dress and chic chignon mark her as fashionable and modern.