Der Vater des Künstlers im Lehnstuhl

'Der Vater des Künstlers im Lehnstuhl' (The Artist's Father in an Armchair), painted in 1869 and held in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, is a rare intimate domestic portrait by von Marées, depicting his father seated in the relaxed informality of private life. By 1869 von Marées had been in Rome for five years and was developing rapidly toward the formal austerity of his mature style; the portrait of his father, presumably produced during a visit to Germany or when his father came to Italy, represents a personal work outside his official artistic programme. Seated armchair portraits of elderly men have a distinguished pedigree in European art — Rembrandt's seated figures, Hals's relaxed portraits, Ingres's monumental seated sitters — and von Marées engages this tradition with the directness and psychological weight his best portraiture achieves. The work remained in the Bavarian collections, entering them as part of the broad acquisition of von Marées's estate.

The armchair provides both a compositional structure and a social signifier of domestic ease, its forms framing and supporting the elderly figure. Von Marées models his father's face with attentive individuality — the wrinkles, the particular quality of aged skin — without lapsing into caricature. The warm palette and sober background maintain the work within his characteristic tonal range.