Lenbach himself attributed his initial attraction to portraiture to his keen ability to observe and analyze anatomical forms. In 1897 Lenbach told Wilhelm Wyl, one of his biographers:
      Even then I noticed that I had uncommonly little imagination and could remember only one thing: the organic logic of nature, if I may be allowed to put it that way. I could see, for instance, how a specific person's ear emerged out of his head and once I had seen that, it stuck with me as an organic inevitability and it appeared before my eyes whenever I thought of it.