Ludwig Knaus was one of Germany’s most successful and influential painters in the second half of the 19th century. He studied at the Art Academy in Dusseldorf, which, along with Paris and Munich, was an important centre of European painting. In Dusseldorf Alexei P. Bogoloubov who studied painting there in the studio of professor Andreas Achenbach met him.
The portrait of a carpenter painted by Ludwig Knaus is the only portrait in Bogoloubov’s collection among the works done by contemporary French and German masters. After studying at the Art Academy in Dusseldorf Ludwig Knaus spent a year in Italy and 8 years in Paris where he studied the methods of up-to-date French masters. He was in London a number of times, visited Italy, Belgium, Holland. However, he lived and worked mostly in Dusseldorf and Berlin.
Ludwig Knaus is a representative of a democratic school at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. He became well-known as a genre and portrait painter. In the end of the 19th — early 20th century Andrei I. Somov, a Russian fine art expert, characterized the painter’s work as follows: “Knaus”s works speak about his fineness of observation, skillfulness in rendering character and inner motion of people of all ages and conditions, ability to create scenes full of vital truth and imbued with either good-natured humour or joyful merrymaking or deep feeling. The dignity of his pictures is elevated by a superb drawing, brilliant colouring and masterful painting.”
Ludwig Knaus mostly focused in his creative work on the daily life of German peasants and generally on the life of a lower class. Many of his works became popular owing to their reproductions issued in engraving, photoengraving and photography. In the hand-written catalogue of the Radishchev Museum dated 1880 the picture was listed as a Study of a Schwartzwald Peasant. The author’s inscription in the upper right-hand corner of the picture makes it possible to specify its name.
Painted here is carpenter Joseph Tietschin from the village of Herrischried in Schwarzwald. Ludwig Knaus preferred the manner of old Dutch masters of genre painting. Many times he painted the portraits of peasants and craftsmen from the vicinities of Schwarzwald located in Baden-Wurttemberg. Among them is a Portrait of a Carpenter. The painter accentuates both physical handsomeness and inner goodness of a common young man, his feeling of self-esteem.
