Four youths - Ludwig von Hofmann

The painting Four Youths, by the Darmstadt-born painter Ludwig von Hofmann (1861-1945), was purchased directly from the Hessian Art Exhibition in Darmstadt in 1917 for the Mainz Picture Gallery. Von Hofmann was trained in Dresden, Karlsruhe, and Paris, became a successful painter and illustrator, taught in Weimar and Dresden himself, and was well-connected in academic, artistic, and literary circles in Germany and Europe. In this period, his work was dominated by the reformist ideals of humanity liberated from convention and tradition, embracing naturalness and nudity. The new human aspires to a bright future in blissful youthfulness.

During his Weimar period, when he was part of the circles around the influential writer and art collector Harry Graf Kessler, his works also unmistakably featured a homoerotic component in both the choice of motifs and the image composition. Our picture is more of a collection of postural studies of beautiful young male bodies, both seated and standing, grouped on a rock to gaze serenely out at the sun. Here, the bright, even garish colour scheme favoured by Hofmann, which he is sometimes criticised for and which is characteristic of many of his paintings, is also clearly evident.