Hans von Marées

Hans von Marées (24 December 1837 – 5 June 1887) was a German painter. Initially specialising in portraiture he later turned to mythological subjects. He spent the last years of his life in Italy.

Life Marées was born into a banking family at Elberfeld, part of Wuppertal since 1829, in the Kingdom of Prussia. In 1847 his family moved to Koblenz, where he was educated at the Gymnasium (grammar school). From 1853 to 1855 he studied at the Berlin Academy, and in 1854 he entered the studio of the painter and printmaker Carl Steffeck. He served in the military ifrom 1855 to 1857, after which he moved to Munich where he met Franz von Lenbach.

During his time in Munich he concentrated mainly on portraiture. In 1864 Count Adolf von Schack sent Marées and Lenbach to Italy to copy old masters.

In 1869, he visited France, the Netherlands and Spain with Fiedler. He served in military in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) and then lived in Berlin and Dresden for a while. In 1873, he decorated the library walls of the newly built German Marine Zoological Institute in Naples, Italy They have no specific symbolic or mythological scheme, being intended simply to express, in Marées' own words, "the joys of sea and beach life".

He turned increasingly to mythological subjects

In the 1880s Marées painted four monumental triptychs: The Judgment of Paris, The Hesperides, Three Saints on Horseback and The Wooing. During this time he also produced smaller mythological paintings and some portraits.