Straußenjagd

'Straußenjagd' (Ostrich Hunt), painted in 1919, is among Stuck's more unusual late subjects, depicting a North African or ancient scene of hunters pursuing ostriches. The subject has no obvious mythological referent and may draw on ancient Roman hunting scenes — the venatio, or arena beast hunt, was depicted across Roman relief sculpture and mosaic — or on orientalist conventions that had appealed to European painters since Delacroix's North African journeys. Stuck never traveled to Africa, working from imagination, scholarly sources, and visual research in European collections and publications. By 1919, in the aftermath of World War I, such subject matter carried a certain escapism — a retreat from the devastated European present into an imagined antique or exotic world of physical spectacle.

The large, fast-moving bodies of ostriches would challenge any painter — their peculiar proportions (tiny head, vast body, powerful legs) resist conventional figure painting approaches. Stuck likely handled them with the rapid, gestural strokes he used for horses in his Wild Hunt compositions,.