His nickname "Pferde-Krüger" (Horse Krüger) seems to take some getting used to, even a little disrespectful, but it still classifies the work of the Saxon painter Franz Krüger reasonably well. Portraits of horses were, to use a play on words, his hobby-horse. Whether in hunting and military paintings or in portraits, very often the hoofed animal so revered by the people can be found as a motif. To dismiss him as a pure horse painter, however, is of course fundamentally wrong.
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Franz Krüger came into contact with animal painting as a child; his interest was awakened by his friend, the ornithologist Johann Friedrich Naumann. Later, during his school days in Dessau, the son of a civil servant found contact with the landscape painter Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, who introduced him to nature as a central artistic theme. At the age of fifteen he enrolled at the Berlin Academy of Arts, but only stayed there for two years. Afterwards he developed his style autodidactically. It was from this period that he got his nickname, as he devoted himself almost exclusively to the representation of animals during this phase. After a number of successful exhibitions, he expanded his spectrum to include portraits. His portraits of prominent contemporaries and important noblemen considerably increased his fame. Already at the age of twenty-eight he was appointed royal professor and became a full member of the Berlin Academy. Among his students were such famous artists as Hermann Gemmel, Karl Konstantin Heinrich Steffeck and Theodor Schloepke. He was also granted the fortune, rather rare for painters, to become wealthy through his work. Thus he could afford to move into a large house in Berlin, where his life now centered. However, he travelled a great deal in order to further his artistic education; among other things, his path took him all over Germany and to France or Russia.
Although Franz Krüger is mainly regarded as a commissioned artist - and saw himself as such - he always succeeded in giving his works their own character. Not only are his works characterized by a high degree of accuracy, lifelike sharpness and attention to detail, they also contain a good deal of subtle humor and sometimes irony as well as quiet social criticism, which means that they are not just pure documentation. In his pictures of military parades, for example, he did not place state leaders or glorious generals at the centre of the action, but rather the citizens or the common people, which can certainly be seen as a softening of traditional hierarchical structures. In this respect, the term "Biedermeier painter", with which Franz Krüger is often referred to, is just as abridged and even misleading as the "horse Krüger". In terms of time, he may belong to the Biedermeier era and his motifs also fit into this bourgeois era, but his works are not really conservative - and certainly not dowdy. It is also worth mentioning that he was one of the first visual artists to use the technique of lithography in their works.
His nickname "Pferde-Krüger" (Horse Krüger) seems to take some getting used to, even a little disrespectful, but it still classifies the work of the Saxon painter Franz Krüger reasonably well. Portraits of horses were, to use a play on words, his hobby-horse. Whether in hunting and military paintings or in portraits, very often the hoofed animal so revered by the people can be found as a motif. To dismiss him as a pure horse painter, however, is of course fundamentally wrong.
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Franz Krüger came into contact with animal painting as a child; his interest was awakened by his friend, the ornithologist Johann Friedrich Naumann. Later, during his school days in Dessau, the son of a civil servant found contact with the landscape painter Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, who introduced him to nature as a central artistic theme. At the age of fifteen he enrolled at the Berlin Academy of Arts, but only stayed there for two years. Afterwards he developed his style autodidactically. It was from this period that he got his nickname, as he devoted himself almost exclusively to the representation of animals during this phase. After a number of successful exhibitions, he expanded his spectrum to include portraits. His portraits of prominent contemporaries and important noblemen considerably increased his fame. Already at the age of twenty-eight he was appointed royal professor and became a full member of the Berlin Academy. Among his students were such famous artists as Hermann Gemmel, Karl Konstantin Heinrich Steffeck and Theodor Schloepke. He was also granted the fortune, rather rare for painters, to become wealthy through his work. Thus he could afford to move into a large house in Berlin, where his life now centered. However, he travelled a great deal in order to further his artistic education; among other things, his path took him all over Germany and to France or Russia.
Although Franz Krüger is mainly regarded as a commissioned artist - and saw himself as such - he always succeeded in giving his works their own character. Not only are his works characterized by a high degree of accuracy, lifelike sharpness and attention to detail, they also contain a good deal of subtle humor and sometimes irony as well as quiet social criticism, which means that they are not just pure documentation. In his pictures of military parades, for example, he did not place state leaders or glorious generals at the centre of the action, but rather the citizens or the common people, which can certainly be seen as a softening of traditional hierarchical structures. In this respect, the term "Biedermeier painter", with which Franz Krüger is often referred to, is just as abridged and even misleading as the "horse Krüger". In terms of time, he may belong to the Biedermeier era and his motifs also fit into this bourgeois era, but his works are not really conservative - and certainly not dowdy. It is also worth mentioning that he was one of the first visual artists to use the technique of lithography in their works.
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