| Theodor Roos | |
|---|---|
'Theodor Roos selfportrait 1673. |
|
| Birth name | Johann Heinrich Roos |
| Born | 1638 Wesel |
| Died | 1698 (aged 59–60) Strasbourg |
| Field | Painting |
| Movement | Baroque |
Theodor Roos (born 1638 in Wesel, died 1698) was a German Baroque painter of historical scenes.
His family left their home in the Palatinate c. 1637, fleeing the Thirty Years War, and moved to Amsterdam around 1640. There, Roos trained with his brother Johann Heinrich Roos during the years (1647–51) in history painting with Guilliam Dujardin (1597–after 1647), in landscape with Cornelis de Bie and in portraiture with Barent Graat. According to Houbraken, he gathered this information from Joachim von Sandrart, who mistakenly wrote Cornelis, but meant Adrian de Bie, his father. Cornelis was a poet, but not a painter, as his father was. Adrian de Bie was living in Brabant after he got back from Rome in 1623 and was still giving drawing lessons in 1660.[1]
The brothers returned with the rest of the family to Germany in 1653, where the brothers worked for a cloister together in Mainz. When Johann moved away, Theodor Roos won a commission in Mannheim to paint the civic guard there, which hung in the city hall. This won him the favor of Charles I Louis, Elector Palatine, whose wedding portraits he painted in return for a golden necklace with a commemorative coin. Thereafter he painted in Strassbourg, Hof van Velde, van Birkenfelt, Bade, Hanau, and Hof van Wirtenburg. In Strassbourg he was granted amnesty when the city went over to the French, because of his long history of painting military heroes.