Self-portrait

Stuck painted this self-portrait in 1905, near the height of his social prestige: he received the title von Stuck in 1906, was professor at the Munich Academy from 1895, and had mentored the young Kandinsky and Klee. He lived in the Villa Stuck that he had designed as a Gesamtkunstwerk. The self-portrait tradition in German art—from Dürer through Menzel and Böcklin—carried enormous weight, and Stuck's panel version shows an artist acutely aware of his place in that lineage. He typically depicted himself with the authority of an artist-prince rather than the introspective vulnerability of Romantic self-portraits. The panel support echoes the materials of Renaissance and Old Master portraiture. The Federal Republic's art collection holds this as a significant document of German artistic identity at the turn of the century.

Oil on panel with the controlled, dark-ground technique of Stuck's academic style, related to the Old Master revival in late nineteenth-century German painting. The chiaroscuro of his subject paintings is applied here to self-representation: the face emerging from shadow with dramatic directional.