Ludwig Knaus
Große Buche (Barbizon-Studie), 1853

Alfred Flechtheim and Ludwig Knaus

The painter and portraitist from Wiesbaden was very successful from the outset and, by around 1900, his work had become extremely popular through etchings and photographs. He was a professor, a Knight of the Prussian Order Pour le Mérite and, in 1861, a medal winner at the Berliner Kunstausstellung.

Knaus studied under Karl Ferdinand Sohn and Wilhelm von Schadow at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf together with Anselm Feuerbach. However, after a disagreement with Schadow he left in 1848. He founded the ‘Malkasten’ with Andreas and Oswald Achenbach, Joseph Fay and Benjamin Vautier, among others, and worked primarily as a portraitist in Düsseldorf. Knaus knew the collector Barthold Suermondt from Aachen and the painters Franz Xaver Winterhalter and Feuerbach. From 1852–60 Knaus travelled extensively around Europe, visiting museums and exhibitions. His trips to Italy left a particularly vivid impression and inspired him thematically. He moved several times between Düsseldorf, Berlin and Wiesbaden. In 1874 he was appointed Royal Prussian Professor at the Akademie der schönen Künste in Berlin, where he settled from then on.

Through a family connection of Alex Vömel’s, Alfred Flechtheim’s colleague, he had access to the Suermondt Collection and as a result, possibly also to works by Knaus.