Die Labung

'Die Labung' (Refreshment), painted in 1880 in tempera and held at Museum Wiesbaden, represents von Marées's relatively rare use of tempera as a medium — a deliberate archaising choice that aligned his practice with Italian early Renaissance masters and with the German Nazarene tradition's interest in pre-oil-painting technique. Tempera, with its fast-drying properties and inability to blend easily, forces a different kind of formal construction than oil: colours are built up through hatching and layering rather than wet blending, creating a distinctive luminosity and chromatic clarity. The subject — figures at rest being refreshed, presumably with food or drink — belongs to the pastoral tradition of the pause in labour or journey, a moment of human respite that von Marées invests with the same formal weight he brings to his mythological subjects. Museum Wiesbaden holds the work as part of its collection of nineteenth-century German painting.

The tempera medium gives the painting a different tonal quality from his oil canvases — colours are more clearly differentiated, the surface has a characteristic dry luminosity, and modelling is achieved through carefully controlled colour layering rather than wet blending. Von Marées adapted his figure-painting approach to the medium with evident success, maintaining his characteristic structural solidity in a technically demanding medium.