Franz von Stuck's oeuvre deals with archetypes and archetypal human behavior in his figures, which are often taken from antiquity but also from narratives found in the Bible. The woman, often closely associated with the element of water, becomes a mermaid or nymph, but she also appears as a combative Amazon or the biblical avenger Judith. Between active and passive roles, however, she always remains an object of desire for the man - just as he is for her. The relationship between the sexes in particular is a constant theme, desire, chasing, teasing, fighting, seducing - Stuck illuminates all of these behaviors in his paintings. The female figures, which are loosely linked to literary models and who always have an eternal and absolute character, are always directed at the pleasure of observing the female body. As a painterly subject, this desire has always been found in depictions of Venus bathing, while its biblical counterpart is the story of Susanna in the bath, which, unlike the ancient veneration of corporeality, is associated with moral demands. Stuck's appropriation of such motifs is particularly interesting, because even though they still represent the classic content, they overwrite it with a liberated approach. They all deal with erotic themes, as here from the Old Testament, and thus postulate quasi-psychological universality, just as early psychology around 1900 attempted to interpret them and remove them from evaluation through conventions. It is not the erotic meaning of these themes that is new, one they have always had, but their removal from the Christian-religious context and their complete adaptation to the contemporary idea of eroticism and its manifestations. The version of the motif presented here is Stuck's first take of the theme. He refers to other great artists of Symbolism such as Arnold Böcklin, who had taken up the motif in 1888 (Susanna im Bade, 1888, Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Oldenburg), followed by scenes of nymphs surprised by a voyeuristic male gaze, he revisited Susanna in versions that put more focus on the female body in its entirety in 1904 and later in 1912/13. This first version, however, has an even more narrative and dramatic character in terms of the scene’s composition and perspective. Another unusual aspect is the Egyptianism, probably fashionable at the turn of the century, which he presents in the decoration of the stone basin in form of depictions of Egyptian deities and hieroglyphs. [KT]