Molly Cramer

Molly Cramer (Hamburg, 1852 - Hamburg, 1936) was a German painter of flowers, landscapes and portraits. Trained in the old Dutch tradition, she turned towards Impressionism in her later years. Her work sits between academic still life painting and the newer currents of the late nineteenth century.

Cramer came from a wealthy Hamburg merchant family. She and her sister, the painter Helene Cramer, could only begin training as artists after their father died in 1882. Her first teachers were Theobald Riefesell, Carl Rodeck and Hinrich Wrage. In 1890 she went to Antwerp to study with Eugène Joors, under whom she painted mainly floral still lifes. Back in Hamburg, she caught the attention of the art gallery director Alfred Lichtwark, who encouraged her to paint local flora instead of the overused bouquets of artificial or dried flowers made popular by Hans Makart's interior design.

Her work was shown at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. From 1898 she widened her subjects to landscapes and portraits, with a style that grew increasingly Impressionist, although flower still lifes remained the core of her output. Her best-known work is Goldlack und Primeln ("Wallflowers and Primroses", 1899, oil on canvas, Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld).

Alongside her sister, she associated with younger painters such as Ernst Eitner, Arthur Illies and Paul Kayser, who founded the Hamburg Artists' Club, though the Cramer sisters were not members. Their house became a meeting place for artists and art lovers, and she bought works by young artists and funded study trips for Eitner. Towards the end of her life she lost much of her standard of living and had to sell works from her collection. She died in Hamburg in 1936, and she is remembered chiefly for her flower still lifes and her role as a patron of the Hamburg art scene.