Girl at the Christmas Tree

Oil on canvas. In 1846, the artist Johann Dietrich Carl Kreul (1803-1867), who had trained in Nuremberg with Academy director Albert Reindel, created this, one of his most charming paintings. In the 1820s, Kreul initially worked as a portraitist of the wealthy middle class. One of his best-known and most appealing portraits is "The Beautiful Girl of Nuremberg" (1827), a young woman of unknown identity wearing Biedermeier period folk dress. A few years later, Kreul turned to genre painting – the form that would bring him his greatest fame.