Professor Lujo Brentano

Stuck's 1914 portrait of Professor Lujo Brentano — now in the Bavarian State Painting Collections — depicts one of Germany's most prominent economists and social reformers. Lujo Brentano (1844-1931) was professor of economics at the University of Munich from 1891 and an influential advocate for workers' rights, labor legislation, and social liberalism. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1927. That Stuck painted him in 1914 — the year World War I began — adds historical weight to a portrait that might otherwise be read as straightforward academic portraiture. Brentano was a distinguished member of the Munich intellectual community that Stuck's social network encompassed; the Villa Stuck served as a gathering place for Munich's academic, artistic, and professional intelligentsia, and Brentano would have moved in overlapping circles. The portrait joins Stuck's 1903 Littmann portrait as a document of Munich academic and professional culture in the Wilhelmine period.

Portraying an elderly professor required Stuck to render aged facial features — the particular quality of skin in old age, the structural changes in facial anatomy — with the same confident precision he brought to younger sitters.