Double portrait Marées and Lenbach

'Double Portrait Marées and Lenbach,' painted in 1863 and now in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, depicts von Marées alongside Franz von Lenbach (1836–1904), the highly successful Bavarian portraitist who became one of the most sought-after painters in Wilhelmine Germany. In 1863 both were young artists in Munich on the cusp of their Italian journeys — Lenbach would travel to Italy on a travel grant from the Schack Collection the following year, where he and von Marées temporarily shared a working environment in Rome. The double portrait captures a moment of professional friendship and mutual aspiration before their careers diverged sharply: Lenbach would achieve enormous worldly success painting the German political elite, while von Marées would remain largely unknown, consumed by formal ambitions few contemporaries could appreciate. The painting is historically significant as a document of this brief convergence.

The double portrait places two young men in close spatial proximity, their bodies turned slightly toward each other in a way that suggests dialogue or shared purpose without requiring actual interaction. Von Marées models both faces with equal seriousness, his own self-portrait element presumably based on mirror observation. The warm palette and plain ground are consistent with his Munich portrait practice of the early 1860s.