Johann Walter-Kurau
1869–1932 · Latvia, Russian Empire · Realism
The story
Three boys bathing on a beach in warm summer sun. Bathing Boys, painted in 1900, is the best-known picture by Jānis Valters, and it hangs in the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, which holds more than 120 of his works. At the turn of the century he was one of the most promising young painters in Latvia, trained at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg.
He was born in 1869 in Jelgava, south of Riga, to a Latvian merchant father and a Baltic German mother, Catharina Kurau. In 1906, with his reputation at home still rising, he left for Dresden and added her surname to his own, becoming Johann Walter-Kurau.
In Germany his painting moved from the academic realism of the 1890s through Impressionism and Expressionism to the edge of abstraction. From around 1916 he lived in Berlin and taught, and his pupils there included the painters Otto Manigk and Karen Schacht. He died in Berlin in 1932, and at a memorial exhibition in April 1933 critics remembered him as a much-loved and influential teacher.
