Life
Georg Melchior Kraus was the sixth of nine children, though five of these died before reaching a year. His parents Cornelia Kraus (née Paulsen) and Johann Georg Kraus ran the "Zur weissen Schlangen" hotel in the Sandgasse in Frankfurt. Georg Melchior Kraus was eight when his father remarried after Cornelia's early death.
From 1759 to 1762 he trained in the studio of the court painter Johann Heinrich Tischbein the Elder at the court of landgraf Frederick II of Hesse-Kassel. In November 1762 Georg Melchior travelled to Paris to study under the best-known copper-engraver of the time, Johann Georg Wille. In Paris he also came into contact with the genre painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze and soon became "genre painter familiar to His Holiness the prince bishop of Wirsbourg"
At the end of 1766 Kraus returned to Frankfurt, at first becoming a private tutor and genre painter. He maintained his French contacts so well that in 1776 he was included on Colisée's list as a genre painter. In Frankfurt his pupils included Sophie von La Roche, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, while he also unsuccessfully petitioned the city council on 2 April 1767 for the establishment of a painting academy.
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