Reinhold Ewald

Reinhold Ewald was born in Hanau, Germany, in 1890. From 1905 to 1906 he trained as a decorative painter, after which he attended Hanau’s drawing school, the Königliche Zeichenakademie. From 1907 to 1911 he was a student at Berlin’s school for the applied arts, the Kunstgewerbeschule. During this time he was represented in a few Berlin Secession exhibitions. In 1912 Ewald returned to Hanau. In the following years he travelled to Italy, where he was impressed by the frescoes by Giotto and Piero della Francesca. In 1914 he had his first solo exhibition at the Kunstsalon Schames in Frankfurt am Main. After military service, from 1916 to 1918 he worked as a war painter in Rouvrois near Longuyon. Ewald subsequently painted frescoes in addition to paintings, and also produced sculptures and designs for jewellery and ceramics. In 1920 he participated in the exhibition of German Expressionism in Darmstadt. The next year he began teaching at Hanau’s drawing school. In 1933 he joined the National Socialist Party, but in the same year he was forced to resign from his teaching post. During the National Socialists’ Degenerate Art campaign his works were confiscated from public collections. In 1949 Ewald was reinstated as a teacher at the drawing academy. He died in Hanau in 1974.