Walter Jakob

Public and market sources most consistently render this artist's name as Walter Jacob, born 21 October 1893 in Altenburg, Thuringia. He began training as a decorative painter in Meerane in 1910, then won a scholarship that allowed him to study at the Konigliche Kunstakademie Dresden from 1916. His studies were interrupted by military service and resumed in 1918. From 1919 to 1921 he was a master student under the painter Robert Sterl, and he is associated with the Dresden Sezession Gruppe 1919 and the second generation of German Expressionism.

In 1940 his painting Kameraden was shown at the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung in Munich, where it was purchased by the Nazi official Adolf Wagner for 2,000 Reichsmark. In 1956 he had what several sources describe as his most important retrospective, comprising more than two hundred paintings, drawings, and watercolors, at the Galerie Andre Maurice in Paris. He died on 13 July 1964 in Bad Hindelang, Allgau.

His graphic works entered the Lindenau-Museum Altenburg in 1992, from the collection of Elisabeth and Alfred Hoh. In 2024 the museum mounted the exhibition Feuer & Farbe: Gemalde und Grafiken von Walter Jacob, held in the Prinzenpalais of the Residenzschloss Altenburg, renewing scholarly and market attention to his work.

Art-historical framing places this artist within the second generation of German Expressionism, shaped by his training under Robert Sterl in Dresden and his association with the Dresden Sezession Gruppe 1919. His 1956 Paris retrospective at the Galerie Andre Maurice is described in available sources as summing up his body of work across more than two hundred pieces, though independent contemporaneous critical reviews could not be confirmed for this profile. The 2024 Lindenau-Museum Altenburg exhibition, drawing on the museum's own 1992 acquisition of his graphics, framed him for a contemporary audience as a regionally significant painter and graphic artist worth reassessing alongside better-known Dresden-trained Expressionists.

The documented secondary market for this artist is thin and regional. The highest price located in the research for this profile is EUR 10,115 (including buyer's premium) for the landscape Agg (Landschaft), recorded in the Lempertz artist index in Cologne; the exact sale date is not published on that index page, so this figure should be read as the best-documented result rather than a confirmed, dated auction record. Sales activity otherwise runs through German houses such as Ketterer Kunst and Auktionshaus Stahl. No gallery or estate is currently documented as representing the artist; his historical dealer was the Galerie Andre Maurice in Paris, active in the 1950s.

Name verification comes first with this artist. Primary sources spell his name Walter Jacob rather than Walter Jakob, and the surname overlaps with unrelated public figures, a German theatre director (1905 to 1977) and a contemporary Argentine playwright and director, so any award, exhibition, or auction listing found online should be checked against the 1893 to 1964 dates before it is attributed to this painter. There is no published catalogue raisonne, only an online Werkverzeichnis maintained independently at walter-jacob.net, so provenance work should lean on the Lindenau-Museum Altenburg's records and on auction-house documentation. The auction market itself is small: only one clearly attributable price, EUR 10,115, could be confirmed for this profile, and it lacks a public sale date, so collectors should treat any claimed "record price" for this artist with caution until a fuller sales history is assembled.