Girl In A Blue Dress

'Girl in a Blue Dress', painted around 1896, represents Stuck's portrait practice at a transitional moment: he had recently been ennobled (1895) and was at the height of his Munich celebrity, in constant demand for portrait commissions from the city's cultural, professional, and aristocratic elite. The blue dress as subject matter is deceptively simple — a young female sitter in a particular garment — but Stuck brings to it his full technical and psychological attention. His portraits from this period show him working against the grain of Munich's dominant portrait tradition as embodied by Franz von Lenbach, whose photographic-realist approach to aristocratic sitters defined the genre. Stuck's portraits tend to be more painterly, more psychologically concentrated, and less interested in the social performance of the sitter.

Blue in Stuck's palette presents an interesting challenge against his characteristic dark ochre and brown grounds. The dress would be rendered with careful attention to the fabric's specific quality — whether silk, cotton, or wool — through differentiated brushwork.