Johann Georg Meyer von Bremen

Sister Knitting with Child, German Academic Realism

1885

Johann Georg Meyer Von Bremen (German 1813-1886) was a genre painter. He was the son of master baker Johann Georg Meyer. His mother was strictly religious. From 1833 he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts , which was led since 1826 by Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow, the son of the sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow. In addition to Schadow, Karl Ferdinand Son was his teacher there. Meyer acquired the necessary craftsmanship skills to make a living from the sale of his paintings, but he was initially unable to do so. From 1841 to 1852 he maintained his own studio in Düsseldorf. On his travels to Brussels and Antwerp Meyer experienced the works of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthonis van Dyck. In 1851 he married the singer Julia Beer. When his painting The Prayer of a Widow received the Little Golden Medal at the Berlin Academic Exhibition, Meyer moved to Berlin in August 1852, where he later opened a studio. The sale of his works was increasingly better; In 1838 he received only 19 Thaler and 25 penny for the painting Mother and Child, so in 1886 his last painting Der Liebling in Berlin yielded 25,000 marks. Meyer was especially popular with emigrants to America, who wanted to preserve a piece of homeland in his pictures. His work the Message of Love, is located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1854, the King of Prussia appointed him a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. After traveling in the Hessian, Bavarian and Swiss mountain districts Meyer gathered images for genre scenes and these then predominated. The artist repeatedly visited Belgium and in 1852 he moved to Berlin where he was made a professor in 1863. He was a member of the Amsterdam Academy and was awarded the Order of Leopold and Medal in Philadelphia in 1876.