Ludwig Knaus: Homecoming

Ludwig Knaus, who was born in Wiesbaden in 1829 and died, highly respected, in Berlin in 1910, is one of the most important German artists of the nineteenth century. With his works, which were successful both in Germany and abroad, he shaped a genre and helped genre painting achieve a unique popularity. He thus set new standards, but was also very successful as a portraitist. With the exhibition at the Museum Wiesbaden and the accompanying catalogue, a link is made to the zenith of Ludwig Knaus’s career. The fact that important major works by the artists were sold to the United States during his lifetime plays a central role in this. It becomes clear how formative Knaus’s work was for the understanding of art in the second half of the nineteenth century. His captivating drawings of outstanding quality published in the catalogue, most of them for the first time, can by all means be regarded as equal to his those of Adolph von Menzel, a colleague of his at the academy in Berlin; they provide important insights into the genesis of his paintings and contribute to understanding Knaus’s artistic cosmos.