Schmidt, Max (1874–1950) was a German ethnologist who devoted himself over many years to the study of the cultures of South American indigenous peoples and wrote related ethnographic works. His scholarly interests centred on field observation and systematic description of societies outside Europe, and his writings reflect the ethnographic emphasis on careful documentation and description. The library holds one work by him, Die Aquarell-Malerei, which discusses watercolour painting techniques and thus lies outside his ethnographic field, indicating that his writings also touched on painting practice. Overall, information about his life and work available in Chinese is rather limited, and the publicly accessible material currently confirms mainly his ethnographic research direction and the above-mentioned work, with further details still to be examined.
