Benjamin Calau
Benjamin Calau (1724–83) was a German portrait painter, who used an encaustic technique.
Life
Calau was born at Friedrichstadt in Holstein in 1724. He moved to Leipzig in 1752, and was appointed court painter there four years later.[1] His work consisted chiefly of portraits and heads painted from his own imagination.[1] He usually painted in dark tones, using an encaustic method, using as his medium a form of "Carthaginian" or "Punic" wax (cire éléodorique), which he had devised in an attempt to revive the process used in antiquity and referred to by Pliny.[1][2] In 1769 he published a book on the method, entitled Ausführlicher Bericht, wie das Punische oder das Eleodorische Wachs aufzulösen.[3]
He painted some portraits for Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim's "Temple of Friendship",[4] a collection of paintings of the poet's friends (totalling more than 120 by the time of his death) that he kept in two rooms in his home in Halberstadt.[5]
He went to Berlin in 1771, where the king awarded him the exclusive right to make and sell the Punic wax. [1]
He died in Berlin in 1783.[2]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Naumann, Robert (1857). Archiv fur die zeichnenden Kunste, mit besonderer Beziehung auf Kupferstecher- und Holzschneidekunst und ihre Geschichte, Volumes 3-4. Leipzig: Rudolpg Weigel. p. 136.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Bryan,1886-9
- ↑ Fernbach, Franz Xaver. Die enkaustische Malerei: ein Lehr- und Handbuch für Künstler und Kunstfreunde (in German). p. 18.
- ↑ "Porträt Johann Arnold Ebert". Museen Digital Sachsen-Anhalt.
- ↑ Richter, Simon (1996). "Winckelmann's Progeny". In =Kuzniar, Alice A. Outing Goethe and his Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. pp. 35–6. ISBN 9780804726153.
Sources
This article incorporates text from the article "CALAU, Benjamin" in Bryan's Dictionary of Painters and Engravers by Michael Bryan, edited by Robert Edmund Graves and Sir Walter Armstrong, an 1886–1889 publication now in the public domain.
External links
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