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.
Read more about this topic: Georg Melchior Kraus
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Somewhere along the line of development we discover who we really are, and then we make our real decision for which we are responsible. Make that decision primarily for yourself because you can never really live anyone else’s life not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life and what you become yourself.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“And we can get back to that raw state
Of feeling, so long deemed
Inconsequential and therefore appropriate to our later musings
About religion, about migrations. What is restored
Becomes stronger than the loss as it is remembered;
Is a new, separate life of its own.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment”
—William Stanley Merwin (b. 1927)