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Hofer, Karl [Carl] (Johannes Christian)
(b Karlsruhe, 11 Oct 1878; d Berlin, 3 April 1955). German painter, draughtsman and printmaker. He was brought up by two great-aunts and later in an orphanage because his father died when he was still an infant, and after leaving primary school he became apprenticed to a bookselling business in Karlsruhe. He began to draw at this time, visiting the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe and (with the help of the mother of his friend Leopold Ziegler, who later became a philosopher) obtaining a scholarship at the Grossherzogliche Badische Akademie der Künste in Karlsruhe in 1897. He learnt little from the painters who taught him, Robert Poetzelberger (1856–1930), Leopold Kalckreuth and Hans Thoma, and instead was influenced by the paintings of Arnold Böcklin. Hofer made the first of his prints in 1899, eventually producing 17 woodcuts, 69 etchings and 190 lithographs closely related in style and subject-matter to his paintings. On travelling to Paris in 1900 on a scholarship he came into contact with Impressionism and the work of Paul Cézanne, but he was little affected by them. On returning to Germany he became a postgraduate pupil of Hans Thoma, following him to Stuttgart in 1902. One of the few paintings of this period not destroyed by Hofer is Children at Prayer (1901), a genre picture in the style of Thoma; its arrangement of people as in a still-life in an indeterminate space anticipates features of his later work.
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