- Die Grotte der Nymphe Egeria bei Rom, 1856.
Karl Ross (15 November 1816 – 5 February 1858) (also known as Charles) was a German painter. He is most known for his paintings of Classical landscapes.[1]
Ross was born in Ruhwinkel,[2] Holstein, then ruled by the Kingdom of Denmark.[3] His paternal grandfather, a doctor, had moved from northern Scotland to Hamburg around 1750;[4] his father, Colin Ross, married Juliane Auguste Remin[5] and moved in 1810 to the Gut Altekoppel estate in Bornhöved, which he managed and later acquired.[6] Karl Ross was the brother of Ludwig Ross, the classical archaeologist and Ephor General of Archaeology of Greece.[3]
In 1832, Ross travelled to Copenhagen, where he studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts until 1834.[2] Among his teachers were Johan Ludwig Lund and Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg.[2] He was awarded an academic prize while at the academy, and sold several oil paintings to prince Christian Frederick, the future Christian VIII.[2]
Ross's elder brother, Ludwig, who was then head of the Greek Archaeological Service, invited him to Greece in 1837.[2] Throughout 1837–1839, he travelled through Greece, variously with his brother Ludwig and other central-European expatriates.[7] He made a journey through Attica to Marathon in 1837 with Ludwig and Ernst Curtius, the future excavator of Olympia.[7] He also stayed with Adolf von Shack near Sparta, travelling and painting, and travelled with von Shack to the ancient sites of Ephesus, Magnesia and Smyrna.[8]
Returning to Germany in 1839, Ross travelled to Munich in the August of that year.[8] From November 1842 until late 1843 he lived in Rome, where he befriended the Austrian painter Carl Rahl.[8] However, his visit was cut short by ill health, and he returned for convalescence to his family estate at Gut Altekoppel.[8] He studied in Paris during 1845.[8]
During the attempted uprising against Denmark in 1848, the provisional government of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenberg sent Ross to Berlin, with a mission of reporting news from the revolt to the Duke of Augustenborg and negotiating assistance from Frederick William IV of Prussia.[9] He took part in meetings of the Provisional Government during April 1848, but played no further part in politics.[9] At the end of the war, he travelled to Munich and then to Rome, after which he settled permanently in Munich from 1851.[9] He is known to have owned Portrait of a Carthusian, a 1446 painting by the Early Netherlandish painter Petrus Christus, until 1854; the painting's ownership history is otherwise unknown until its acquisition by the National Gallery of London in 1857.[10]
In 1847, Ross married Helene Abendroth, then aged twenty, whom he had met and taught during his time in Rome.[8] She was the daughter of August Abendroth, who had supported Ross's art career, encouraged his studies abroad and bought many of his paintings.[11]
Ross was affected by ill health throughout his life.[2] He died of typhus on February 5, 1858, in Munich, and was buried in Bornhöved.[12] The author Hermann Lingg wrote his obituary.[12] His wife Helene outlived him, dying in 1911.[8]
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