Suzanne and the 2 eldermen

Suzanne and the Two Elders of 1865, in the Führermuseum collection, takes one of the most charged subjects in the history of nude painting — the attempted voyeuristic assault on Bathsheba's righteous neighbor recorded in the Book of Daniel — and treats it as an occasion for sensuous figure painting in the tradition of Artemisia Gentileschi, Rembrandt, and Rubens. The subject was beloved precisely because it provided a moral pretext for the depiction of female nudity and the drama of unwanted male surveillance. Makart's early treatment, produced at age twenty, already demonstrates his comfort with the genre. The Führermuseum provenance connects this work to the Nazi art acquisition program that swept up enormous quantities of Austrian and German academic painting. Makart's work occupied a peculiar position in Nazi cultural politics: his celebrations of Viennese bourgeois grandeur and historical sensuality were both admired and complicated by their association with Habsburg cultural excess.

The Suzannah subject requires Makart to balance the nude female figure against two clothed male figures in a dramatic spatial confrontation. At twenty, his handling of the contrast between Suzannah's vulnerability and the elders' encroachment already shows compositional assurance. The warm golden tonality that characterizes his early work envelops the scene in an atmosphere of lush sensuality that somewhat mutes the subject's moral drama.