Hans Thoma

Hans Thoma abandoned his apprenticeships as a lithographer and clock-plate painter to pursue self-taught painting and drawing studies until he was accepted at the art school in Karlsruhe in 1859. His studies there with Johann Wilhelm Schirmer had less of an influence on him; Thoma had his artistic awakening in Paris, where he travelled together with Otto Scholderer in 1868 after stays in Basel and Düsseldorf. There he was deeply impressed by the paintings of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon School.
From 1870-1876 Thoma lived in Munich and travelled to Italy for the first time in 1874. In Munich he painted mainly lyrical landscapes, while in Frankfurt, where he moved in 1878, he focused on narrative and allegorical representations. During this period he created the frieze with mythological scenes in the Palais Pringsheim in Munich and the paintings in the house of the architect Simon Ravenstein, Thomas’s most important supporter in Frankfurt along with the art critic Anna Spier.
Since his exhibition in 1890 at the Munich Kunstverein, Thoma has gained general recognition as a painter. In 1899 Thoma became professor at the art school in Karlsruhe and director of the Kunsthalle, where he decorated the Thoma Chapel with scenes from the life of Christ. His landscapes from the Black Forest, the Upper Rhine Plain and the Taunus, which are close to the Kronberg painters’ colony, as well as his portraits of friends and relatives, but also his self-portraits, are considered his best works artistically today.