Portrait of Mary, the artist's daughter

The present work shows von Stuck's daughter, Mary, dressed as an Infanta in the style of Velazquez. As is the case with the present composition, the artist frequently made photographs of his sitters to work them into multiple pictures (see fig. 1). There exists an oil version of the present work, and two full-length portraits, in one of which Mary is depicted alongside her mother and father.

Von Stuck was fond of depicting Mary in a variety of historical costumes. Some critics have noted that by dressing up his sitters, he depersonalised them in favour of the decorative possibilities afforded by the clothes he dressed them in. While this is indeed the case in, for example, his stylized profile female portraits executed in an Italian Renaissance style, virtually all the artist's renditions of his daughter show her looking knowingly at the viewer.