The Rowers

'The Rowers,' painted in 1873 and now at the Alte Nationalgalerie, belongs to the same crucial year as several of von Marées's key Italian works and represents his effort to make masculine physical labour — rather than mythological heroism — the subject of monumental figure painting. Rowing offered him what the male nude in an Arcadian landscape also offered: bodies in action, muscles under strain, the full display of physical structure in purposeful movement. Unlike Courbet's contemporaneous treatment of working figures, von Marées is not interested in social commentary; the rowers are bearers of formal qualities — mass, energy, gesture — rather than representatives of a class or condition. The work was produced during the same Roman sojourn in which von Marées was consolidating the formal theories he developed in dialogue with Konrad Fiedler, and the physical exertion of rowing translates those theories into the language of the active body.

The composition organises the rowers' bodies in a horizontal band across the picture plane, their extended arms and tensed muscles creating a rhythm of repeated and varied forms. Von Marées handles the figures with his characteristic structural density, the bodily forms reading as solid, weighty presences. The water and boat provide a minimal setting that keeps attention on the figures rather than the environment.