Hans von Marées, born in Elberfeld in 1837, is one of the most important 19th-century German painters to emerge from what is Wuppertal today. He lived and worked in Munich. The Von der Heydt Museum has an extensive collection of mostly early works by him, influenced by the late-Romantic stance predominant in Munich. At this time Marée is preoccupied with military themes and portraits, but his importance is based on paintings from the 1870s and 80s. These are nudes that recall antiquity while seeming to stand outside of time – as the evocation of a lost paradise.
Marées numbers with Arnold Böcklin and Anselm Feuerbach, and the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand, among the so-called Deutschrömer, a circle of artists who travelled to Italy and were inspired by the art of the Italian Renaissance. Böcklin and Feuerbach idealise the figure as much as Marées the nude. At the same time they enrich their imagery with deeper symbolic meanings, opening them up to myth and legend.
