Franz Graf, “Two Boys in a Boat on Lake Mark”, 1920, Oil on Canvas
Born in 1880 in Theresienstadt, Germany, Franz Graf spent his childhood in Leitmeritz, a town on the Elbe River in the northern part of the Czech Republic. He studied from 1889 at the Munich Academy with the painter Nikolaus Gysis, a leading representative of the 19th century Greek art movement “Munich School”.
Franz Graf also was a student of German landscape painter Alexander Marcks and Lovis Corinth, best known for his adaptation of French Impresssionism into his psychologically expressive paintings. Graf was actively working in the Friedenau area of Berlin until 1945 when he moved to Travemünde, a borough of Lübeck, where he died in 1950.