(b Tilsit, April 5, 1845; d Berlin, July 24, 1914). German painter. He studied at the Berlin Akademie der Künste from 1862 to 1864, and he continued his training under Karl Müller (1818–93), Carl Ferdinand Sohn and Oswald Achenbach at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie until 1869. During the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War, he was with the occupying army in Paris, where he discovered the miniature battle-pieces of Ernest Meissonier and also modern French plein-air painting. In 1872 he returned to Düsseldorf and began to make a reputation with his portraits and scenes from the recent war. The atmospheric mood and emphatic use of colour in works such as Transportation of Prisoners after the Capture of Metz in 1870 (1872; Kassel, Neue Gal., on loan from Berlin, Neue N.G.) gave a new impetus to the Düsseldorf school of battle painting. Kolitz’s military scenes were among the earliest German images to portray war in a realistic manner and therefore in a critical light. In ...