Julian Klein von Diepold - "Sailor on Norderney"

Julian Klein von Diepold
(* 25 January 1868 in Dortmund; † 20 November 1947 on Norderney) was a German landscape and portrait painter as well as graphic artist of the Düsseldorf School.
He grew up in Düsseldorf from 1873, where he received his first painting lessons from his father. From 1886 he studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. His teachers there were Hugo Crola and Peter Janssen the Elder.
In 1888, Klein von Diepold moved to the Antwerp Academy, where he was a student of Charles Verlat and a master student of Julian De Vriendt (1842–1935). After attending drawing classes (1888–1891), in which he worked from antique and living models, he attended a sculpture class in 1890/1891. Under De Vriendt's guidance, he created his first independent paintings from 1892/1893. He undertook study trips through Belgium and France, which introduced him not only to the paintings of the Flemish and Old Dutch masters, but also to contemporary painting, such as the art of Vincent van Gogh, Jozef Israels, Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet and the Barbizon School. From 1893 onwards he had his own studio in Antwerp, whose academy awarded him a prize in the same year.
In 1893 he travelled to Italy. He visited the Italian Riviera and Florence, where he tried his hand at sculpture for six months before going to Paris in 1894, attracted by French Impressionism. In 1895 he returned to the Riviera. In 1896 he married the Italian Ida Bianchi, the daughter of an engineer, and moved with her to Rome. The couple had two children, a daughter Maria and a son Helmut. Between 1903 and 1914 Klein von Diepold made several trips and changed his place of residence several times, for example to Antwerp and the Taunus, from where he ran a student studio in Frankfurt am Main. In 1909 he set up a studio in Berlin, and in 1910 he was back on the Riviera, near Genoa. He lived there with his family until the outbreak of the First World War, which led him to move to Berlin, where he became familiar with the German Impressionism of Max Liebermann, Walter Leistikow, Max Slevogt and Lovis Corinth and took part in the exhibitions of the Free Secession between 1916 and 1918.
In 1919 he accepted an invitation from the mayor of Emden, Leo Fürbringer, and discovered the landscape of East Frisia for his painting. In 1923 he lived for a year in Mansie near Westerstede. After divorcing his wife Ida, he married Margarethe Iderhoff from East Frisia in 1925. The couple, who moved to Norderney and lived there in the summer, had a son, Manfred, who would later become a sculptor. In winter, Klein von Diepold stayed either in Berlin or in Italy. The Berlin studio, which housed most of his paintings, was destroyed shortly before the end of the Second World War.
Klein von Diepold mostly painted in oil, mainly landscapes, but also portraits, some still lifes and genre scenes. He also painted landscapes in watercolor, figure and landscape studies in chalk, charcoal, red chalk or pencil, and portraits in pastel. He also created lithographs and etchings.