Johannes Matthaeus Koelz dating history

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Johannes Matthaeus Koelz (31 March 1895 – 3 July 1971) was a German-British artist, originally from Upper Bavaria. His career peaked during the middle 1930s. Little more was heard of him after he fled to England in 1937, and after he died he was generally forgotten. That changed more than a generation later when a portrait-sketch that he had painted of Adolf Hitler was found in a private collection. It was known that he had been offered a fabulously fat fee and sufficient access to paint the leader in 1936 or 1937, but it was widely accepted that he had turned down the offer, after casual mention was made that he would be required, as a courtesy, to wear a "brown shirt" party uniform in Hitler's presence. Disagreement persists among experts as to whether he somehow gained the necessary access after all, or whether the painting was produced - in total defiance of the artist's known preferences - from one or more of the many photographs of Hitler that were produced during this period. Apart from the Hitler painting, Koelz is primarily known for his imposing church art, and in particular for the vast anti-war triptych, "Thou Shalt Not Kill". Immediately before escaping the country, he arranged and oversaw the cutting of the work into sixteen or twenty pieces, at the village sawmill. The pieces were distributed to friends and family members: he hoped thereby to preserve the work from the unsympathetic attentions of the security services. ("Pacifist propaganda" was out of favour with the political class at the time.) Much later, in 1998, four of the pieces were donated by his daughter to the New Walk Art Gallery in Leicester, England. According to some sources two more pieces subsequently turned up. This was enough, with the help of (at that time) modern computer-aided imaging techniques and an old photograph taken while the composition was still not quite finished, for an arresting digitally remastered copy of it to be contrived.