Georg Oswald May (1738-1816)

The portrait painter Georg Oswald May was born in Offenbach on January 23, 1738 as the son of the silk stocking weaver Johann Georg May, who had married Anna Maria Geißer in 1735. He only began studying painting in Offenbach in 1759 at the age of 21, where he was particularly interested in French pastels and courtly portraits. He continued his studies in Mannheim and Düsseldorf, where he mainly practiced as a copyist. He produced copies of works by Rubens and van Dyck. In 1783, he married Antoinette Elisabeth André (22.10.1745-15.12.1815), a daughter of the Offenbach silk manufacturer Marc André. May quickly became known as a portrait painter and, in addition to important personalities from bourgeois circles, mainly painted aristocrats, which earned him the titles "Court Painter" and "Court Councillor". May lived in Offenbach until 1815. After the death of his wife, he moved to Frankfurt am Main, where he lived in his son-in-law's house in the Junghof district. He died there on July 12, 1816.
The Georg-Oswald-May-Weg in Offenbach commemorates the painter.

Georg Oswald May was primarily active as a portrait painter; he painted in oil and pastel. He is best known as the painter of the youthful Goethe, whom he painted twice in 1769. This is why he is also known as the "Goethe painter".
Only a few paintings by May are known today: Many are lost, others are in the family possessions of former princely and count families. As he rarely signed his paintings, it is not easy to attribute them with certainty. May also painted portraits of Wieland, Lessing (around 1767), Goethe's mother (1776) and Sophie La Roche, who dedicated a rhyme to the painter in her novel "Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim":

"May, you painted folds and folds,
Of my aging face.
See here my soul's features,
these change nothing..."

Georg Oswald May's work belongs to the Rococo period. In the context of portraiture, the contemporary relationship to physiognomy is worth mentioning. The theologian and writer Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801) believed that the character and nature of the sitter could be read from their facial features. He dealt intensively with physiognomy, the study of facial features and their ethical and moral evaluation. In his four-volume work "Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe" (1775-78), of which Goethe was one of the hidden collaborators, he collected countless silhouettes - which were very popular at the time of Empfindsamkeit - as evidence and illustrations of his theories.