Rudolf Jacobi, was born in Mühlhausen, Thuringia in Germany.  He apprenticed as a painter of stage sets, attended the Royal Academy in Berlin.  Jacobi took part in exhibitions and became a member of the Berlin Secession. He was a soldier in the flight division during WWI.  In 1921 he married painter and pacifist Anna Ottonie Krigar-Menzel (Annot), with whom he founded the Annot School of Painting.  Although he began as an impressionist he became a measured expressionist, though he also painted numerous landscapes, cityscapes and portraits.  The Nazis shut the Annot School in 1933 after Jacobi and Annot, who were not Jewish, refused to dismiss Jewish students from the school.

The Jacobi family emigrated to New York in 1934 and they reopened the Annot School in Rockefeller Centre.  Jacobi exhibited at the Salons of America, 1934; Carnegie Institute; Corcoran Gallery biennials, 1943, 1951; AIC; PAFA; CAM; SFMA; & abroad.  His works were acquired by museums in New York and other American cities, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Springfield Museum.

During the 30’s and 40’s the Jacobi family lived in New York and Gloucester, Massachusetts where Jacobi painted the Gloucester Fishermen at Lunch.  They moved to Puerto Rico in 1956 and returned to Germany in 1967, settling in Munich, where Jacobi died in 1972.

Sources:
(1) The Feldberg Collection: Exile to Exhibition
(2) Falk, Peter Hastings (editor), Who Was Who in American Art: 1564-1975, Sound View Press, 1999.

Submitted by Steve Wasser.