What pleases me most is being able to tell you of the late flowering of my painting in the last two years. Three years ago, I was seriously ill, prostrate in hospital in Frankfurt, and had had an operation - from all of which I emerged renewed. Now I paint portraits, realistic ones that do not deny my Expressionist background and are of a quality that is by no means less than that of that time in the past, forty-eight years ago. So near the grave, I awakened to a new, vigorous life and every day fills me with wonder at what I am able to do in this, my 77th year.

letter to Franz Landsberger, dated 28 June 1960, Stadtarchiv Darmstadt, ST 45 Meidner, Nr. 692

So I am moving to Frankfurt and will live in the Jewish Community's home for senior citizens until I have my own flat. I want to step up my painting activities and concentrate on portraits and landscapes. Here in England, I was forced to limit myself to watercolours, and in my fourteen years of exile, I produced several hundred interesting watercolours, which, as far as style and content are concerned, I would not have done in Germany. Not English art, but the English environment did influence me in the end. The comic and humorous aspects that English art used to have are also present in these watercolours, which are very competently done, by the way. I never would have imagined that I would do anything like them. It must have been a reaction to our dire circumstances; I needed something to cheer me up.

In the past five years I have been working on a series of 120 large charcoal drawings on themes from the Bible and the Talmud. They include a number of lovely, mature drawings of a kind I probably would not yet have been capable of in the past. I also completed a series of approximately 50 drawings which I called Love, Lust, Death and Damnation. These works are not "literary", as the title would lead one to believe, but rather completely artistic in concept, with form being the decisive factor. I have also been able to continue the theme, "Judaism in the Synagogue", with success. [...]

My wife did very nice figurative oil paintings last year, very cultivated, a lovely and fascinating sight to behold and very skilfully and competently done. Unfortunately, this kind of art is not up-to-date in London at all; here, purely abstract (non-figurative) work is coming to the fore more and more. In New York, this kind of painting has been en vogue for years, and in Germany, figurative painting is hardly even accepted at the big exhibitions any more. For this reason, I left the Deutscher Künstlerbund 1950 again.

Letter from Ludwig Meidner to Franz Landsberger, dated 18 June 1953, Stadtarchiv Darmstadt, ST 45 Meidner, Nr. 691