The double portrait of Franz von Stuck and Mary Lindpainter, to whom he had been married since 1897, was created on the occasion of one of the great festivals of the Munich artist community at the turn of the century. In the medallion based on Roman portraits, with an inscription-like painted plaque in the lower edge, the beautiful couple is shown, Stuck with the green laurel wreath, Mary with the golden circlet of a goddess. Stuck, who liked to see himself as a wild faun, gives himself a darker skin tone, while Mary shines brightly in the foreground. The motto of the festival, organized by the Munich artists' community Allotria and the Munich Secession was "In Arcadia" and took place in the impressive Royal Court Theater. Last but not least, the event had the charitable purpose of raising funds to build a new artists' house. The reveling bohemians gathered in the antique backdrop of a Parthenon, dressed as mythological figures, gods, fauns, bacchantes, gladiators and pharaohs. Stuck and Mary showed up as a Roman patrician or Greek god couple. The motto was to be understood as an allusion to the Arcadia of art, music and literature, which - albeit with reference to Greece and antiquity - exists as an idea of a place and a time in which contentment and happiness reign. At the same time, it refers to the Renaissance era as the rebirth of antiquity and as the high point of European artistic creativity, not only from Stuck's point of view. As a representative of a renewed Renaissance and the art boom around the turn of the century, Stuck shows himself in the present work as a painter prince crowned with a laurel.

The work of art looks back on a provenance history that is as important as it is moving. Until his death, it was in the collection of Fritz Eckel, councilor of commerce and owner of a large winery. Later, most likely before 1931, the work entered the collection of the well-known Frankfurt manufacturer Paul Metz. Metz, owner of an Offenbach screw factory, was a big name in Frankfurt social life, lived in a luxurious villa in Frankfurt and had another one on Lake Starnberg. However, the 1930s brought about change. After 1933, Paul Metz, who was baptized as a Lutheran and classified as Jewish according to the Nazi’s racial doctrine, was unable to recover from the consequences of the global economic crisis. However, he did not part with the painting by Franz Stuck for a long time. It was not until 1939 that he sold the picture together with another work for a total of 600 RM to the art dealer Wilhelm Ettle. In 1942, Paul Metz was deported to Theresienstadt before he was murdered in Treblinka.
Stuck's painting was then owned by Willy Schenk, a Maulbronn entrepreneur, to whom Ettle sold it immediately after he had taken it over from Paul Metz. As it was under suspicion of being Nazi-looted after the war, it remained in the Collecting Point in Wiesbaden until 1952. However, the painting was then returned to Willy Schenk, although Clemens Metz, Paul Metz's only son, had reported the painting “Selbstgemälde der Eheleute Stuck auf einem Künstlerfest " as a loss after the war. After Willy Schenk's death in 1958, the painting remained in his family.
Today, Franz von Stuck's impressive "Künstlerfest” (Artist's Festival) can be offered without pending restitution claims and in an amicable agreement with the heirs after Paul Metz. [KT/AT]