Hans von Marées

Origins and early life

Hans von Marées was born in Elberfeld on 24 December 1837, the son of Adolf von Marées, a Prussian official of Huguenot descent, and of Friederike Susmann, the daughter of a Jewish merchant of the Rhineland — the one Jewish grandfather on whom this fiche rests, as the German biographies and a Heidelberg study of the painter record it.

Work and career

He trained in Berlin and in Munich, where he painted horses and soldiers with a heaviness that already set him apart from the anecdotal painting of his time, and in 1864 the collector Adolf von Schack sent him to Italy to copy the old masters; he never really came back. In Rome he met the art theorist Konrad Fiedler, who supported him for the rest of his life, and the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand, and together the three worked out an idea of art as pure form, free of story and sentiment, that the twentieth century would call its own.

His one great public work came in 1873, when the zoologist Anton Dohrn asked him to decorate the library of the new Zoological Station at Naples: the frescoes of fishermen, orange pickers and bathers by the bay, painted in a few months, are among the most serene works of the nineteenth century, and the only ones of his that were finished. Everything else — the Hesperides, the Golden Age, the Judgment of Paris, the men and horses in the groves — he painted and repainted for years in his Roman studio, in layers of oil and tempera that darkened as he worked, dissatisfied to the end.

Later years

He died in Rome on 5 June 1887, almost unknown; Fiedler bought the studio's contents, and when they were shown in Munich in 1891 the young painters of Germany, and later Beckmann, recognized their ancestor.