Maria Barbara Krafft née Steiner (1764-1825)

• Was an Austrian painter, best remembered today for her widely reproduced posthumous portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
• She was born in Jihlava, in the Czech Republic where her father, the Austrian Imperial court painter Johann Nepomuk Steiner, was working at the time.

• She was taught painting by her father and accompanied him to Vienna, where she exhibited her first painting in 1786 at the Academy of Fine Arts.

• In 1789 she married the Viennese pharmacist Josef Krafft.

• Their son Johann August Krafft, born in 1792 and taught by his mother, later became a painter and lithographer.

• For various periods between 1794 and 1803 Krafft worked and travelled alone in Jihlava, Salzburg, and Prague, achieving increasing success primarily as a portrait painter.

• By 1804 she was separated from her husband and settled in Salzburg where she lived until 1821.

• In the last four years of her life, she was the appointed City Painter in Bamberg where she painted 145 paintings.

• She died at the age of 61.

• Next