Slevogt was one third of the "Triumvirate of German Impressionism", alongside Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth. His Egyptian watercolours of 1914, painted during a trip to the Nile, represent the high point of German Impressionist colour: luminous, rapid, capturing heat and light with an urgency that the studio could never replicate.

He was born in Landshut, Bavaria, in 1868 and studied in Munich and Paris. He painted theatre scenes, plein-air landscapes, book illustrations, murals and opera stage sets. He died in 1932.