Faun and Mermaid

Faun and Mermaid of 1918 is a late mythological work by Stuck, painted three years before his death and amid the upheavals following Germany's defeat in the First World War. The mythological subjects that had seemed charged with dark erotic power in the 1890s now existed in a changed cultural context—the world had seen enough actual violence to make symbolic violence feel dated or escapist. The faun—a classical woodland creature, half man half goat—was a standard Symbolist figure for male sensuality and appetite; the mermaid represented the dangerous beauty of the sea. Their combination in an embrace extends Stuck's career-long interest in erotic encounters between incompatible types of being. The Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin holds this late work as part of its comprehensive German art holdings from the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods.

Oil on canvas with the controlled dark-ground academic technique Stuck maintained throughout his career. The mythological subjects demanded confident figure work: the faun's hybrid anatomy (human torso, goat legs) and the mermaid's (woman's body, fish tail) required combining observed anatomy with.