Alongside his symbolistic and mythological scenes, Franz von Stuck also made his mark as an outstanding portrait painter. Although he favored portraits of actresses and Munich’s fashionable socialites, as well as his own daughter Mary, his reputation extended all across Germany. In 1921, the successful Dortmund building contractor Heinrich Butzer (1884-1965) also had his portrait painted. On the strength of the impressive result, Stuck was commissioned to paint further portraits of Butzer’s wife Martha (1923) and their three children. Like his colleague and competitor Franz von Lenbach, Stuck used photographs, taken by himself or his wife Mary in his own studio, to reduce the time his models had to be present in the studio during the painting process. This approach also reflected a change in patterns of visual perception at a time when painting was starting to face competition from photography. Besides serving as a visual aid to memory, Stuck also made extensive use of the photographs to prepare the technical details of his paintings. The photograph of Martha Butzer, for example, which is preserved as part of the estate, thus bears characteristic scratch marks on the front and a charcoal drawing along the contours of the face, along with an arrow and measurements, on the back. Nevertheless, Stuck often tweaked the proportions of the face and body in his paintings, adapting the subject’s appearance to the artistic image and ideal of beauty of the time. Using Syntonos tempera paints produced in Fürth in 1893, Stuck gives the surface a matte, fresco-like appearance, which recalls the Renaissance art that served as Stuck’s main inspiration. [KT]