Lob der Bescheidenheit

Lob der Bescheidenheit (In Praise of Modesty, 1884), in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, belongs to the final phase of Marées's career, when he was working obsessively on the large-scale triptychs and multi-figure allegories that would define his posthumous reputation. Painted on panel, this work carries the classical allegorical ambition that occupied his last decade: Marées sought, in a series of compositions on the themes of the ages of life, the Hesperides, and related subjects, to create a monumental figurative art that distilled the spiritual content of the Mediterranean classical tradition. The title's irony — Marées was anything but modest in his artistic aims — perhaps signals a meditation on the virtue he was constitutionally incapable of practicing, making the subject a private philosophical joke as much as a classical allegory.

The panel support contributes to the dense, almost encrusted surface of Marées's late work, where successive campaigns of revision left a paint layer of considerable complexity. His late palette favors muted, earthy harmonies — ochres, umbers, warm greens — that give the figures the quality of emerging from the earth itself. The figures are modeled through color modulation rather than linear contour.