STUCK Franz von (1863-1928) – Der Stein der Weisen
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Franz von Stuck (1863-1928) Der Stein der Weisen (The Philosopher’s Stone), c. 1896, gouache and ink on paper, laid down on board, H. 47.6 cm; W. 61.7 cm (18 7/8 x 24 3/8 in).
Provenance: Munich, Max and Theodor Klopfer Collection (1908); German art market, 2025
Bibliography: H. Voss, Franz von Stuck, 1863-1928. Werkkatalog der Gemalde, Munich, Prestel, 1973, pp. 130 and 276.
By 1896, Franz von Stuck was the most famous and widely discussed painter in Munich. Seven years earlier, he had astonished the public with The Guardian of Paradise, a bold, self-assured and iconic work that announced a brilliant career. Four years before, he had taken part in the Munich Secession, and the year prior he had been appointed professor at the Academy, where he would teach future protagonists of twentieth-century art such as Kandinsky, Klee and Albers.
This gouache, dated to 1896 by the art historian H.
Voss, belongs to a particularly fertile moment in Stuck’s production, when the artist was creating or about to create his finest works. It is a period in which he was called upon to consolidate his success and to fully display his extraordinary talent as a maker of images.
In addressing the theme of the Philosopher’s Stone, Stuck seeks to encapsulate the sense of eternity and grandeur associated with such a powerful object. He does so through the image of a classical sculpture standing on a pedestal, holding a white diamond that radiates an otherworldly light. The more esoteric dimension of the Magnum Opus is expressed through the engulfing blue flames, a colour traditionally linked to the supernatural, and through an atmosphere of fumes and vapours that here and there condense into a rain of fire. The image seems to allude, beneath its declared monumentality, to the long initiatory path that precedes such a vision.
