Benjamin Calau (1724–1785) was a German portrait painter, who used an encaustic technique.

Life

Calau was born at

Friedrichstadt Friedrichstadt (; ; ; ; ) is a town in the district of Nordfriesland, in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. It is situated on the river Eider approx. 12 km (7 miles) south of Husum. History The town was founded in 1621 by Dutch settlers. Duk ...

in Holstein in 1724, son of the painter Christoph Calau. He trained under his father, and in 1743 followed him to

St Petersburg Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...

, returning to Germany in 1746.'Benjamin Calau (1724 – 1785) ' in Lambert 2011, p.5 He moved to Leipzig in 1752, and was appointed court painter there four years later. His work consisted chiefly of portraits and of heads painted from his own imagination. He usually painted in dark tones, often using as his medium a form of "Carthaginian" or "Punic" wax (''cire éléodorique''), which he had devised in an attempt to revive an encaustic technique used in antiquity and referred to by Pliny. In 1769 he published a book on the method, entitled ''Ausführlicher Bericht, wie das Punische oder das Eleodorische Wachs aufzulösen''. He painted some portraits for

Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim (2 April 1719 – 18 February 1803) was a German poet, commonly associated with the Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment and Rococo#Literature, Rococo movements. Life Gleim was born at the small town of Ermsleben in t ...

's "Temple of Friendship", 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. In 1771 he went to Berlin, where the king awarded him the exclusive right to make and sell the Punic wax. It was also there that he assisted the scientist

Johann Heinrich Lambert Johann Heinrich Lambert (; ; 26 or 28 August 1728 – 25 September 1777) was a polymath from the Republic of Mulhouse, at that time allied to the Switzerland, Swiss Confederacy, who made important contributions to the subjects of mathematics, phys ...

with the creation of his ''Farbenpyramide'' (colour pyramid), conceived as a practical investigation of the theoretical writings on colour of

Tobias Mayer Tobias Mayer (17 February 172320 February 1762) was a German astronomer famous for his studies of the Moon. He was born at Marbach, in Württemberg, and brought up at Esslingen in poor circumstances. A self-taught mathematician, he earned a l ...

. Lambert published the results of his researches in 1772 as ''Beschreibung einer mit dem Calauischen Wachse ausgemalten Farbenpyramide'' ("Description of a colour pyramid painted with Calau's wax").Introduction to Lambert 2011. He died in Berlin in 1785.

References

Sources

* Attribution: *

External links

Works painted for Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim
{{DEFAULTSORT:Calau, Benjamin 1724 births 1783 deaths 18th-century German painters 18th-century German male artists German male painters German portrait painters People from Friedrichstadt German court painters