Nude Women in a Landscape

'Nude Women in a Landscape,' painted in 1870 and held at the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard, represents von Marées's Italian period treatment of the female nude in an outdoor setting — a subject with the deepest roots in European painting from Giorgione's 'Sleeping Venus' through Titian, Rubens, and Poussin. By 1870 von Marées had been in Rome for six years and had completed the Naples frescoes; his formal approach was increasingly focused on the figure in landscape as the primary subject of monumental painting. The Busch-Reisinger Museum, dedicated to German-speaking art, holds this work as part of its core collection of nineteenth-century German artists often neglected by mainstream Anglo-American art history. The painting represents his female nude counterpart to the male nude compositions he was developing simultaneously in works like 'Six Nude Men.'

The landscape setting bathes the figures in warm outdoor light, creating the kind of unified figure-landscape tonal relationship that von Marées pursued throughout his career. His modelling of the female figures emphasises structural form over erotic surface — the nudes have the same formal weight and mass-consciousness as his male figures. The palette is warm and carefully harmonised throughout.