Georg Melchior Kraus
Biography
Kraus is the reason we know what Weimar looked like. A painter from Frankfurt, born in 1737, he settled here in 1774 and stayed until his death in 1806, and he spent those decades drawing the place and the people in it.
Goethe's verdict on him
The biographical dictionaries single out his gift for catching domestic, companionable gatherings as portraits — and the judgement they quote is Goethe's own. That is a useful thing to know before looking at his work: what he was good at was not grandeur but the room after dinner, the group around a table, the ordinary sociability that the period's literature keeps describing and almost nobody else bothered to draw.
The drawing school
He ran the ducal free drawing school, which trained artisans alongside artists and mattered to a small town's economy as much as to its art — an academy and a trade school in one building. It is the least glamorous line in his biography and probably the most consequential, because it is where a residence town got the skilled hands that its workshops, its printers and its publishers then employed.
The Journal, 1786–1806
With the publisher Friedrich Justin Bertuch he jointly issued the Journal des Luxus und der Moden from 1786, supplying its artistic direction. It told German readers what the age wore, bought and furnished its rooms with, and it did so in pictures — which is why two centuries later it functions as a photograph album of a period that had no photographs. He died in Weimar in November 1806.
Questions visitors ask
- What is Georg Melchior Kraus known for?
- A painter who settled in Weimar in 1774 and spent decades drawing the town and its people. Goethe himself praised his gift for turning domestic, companionable gatherings into portraits.
- What did Georg Melchior Kraus do at the ducal drawing school?
- He ran the ducal free drawing school, which trained artisans alongside artists, taking it over in 1776 or 1780 — the reference works differ on the year.
- What was the Journal des Luxus und der Moden?
- A magazine on fashion, purchases and furnishings that Kraus published with Friedrich Justin Bertuch from 1786, supplying its artistic direction until his death in 1806. It now functions as a picture-record of a period that had no photographs.
Notable Works & Achievements
Journal des Luxus und der Moden (artistic direction, with Bertuch, from 1786)
Views and portraits of Weimar
Historical Context
The period's eye — the man who drew the town while it was becoming famous.
For roughly sixty years a duchy of a few thousand people held the centre of German literature, because its ruler kept inviting writers to live there and then gave them jobs. That is the whole mechanism, and it ran from Goethe's arrival in 1775 to his death in 1832.
Read more about this period →Quick Facts
1737
1806
German