Karl Weschke

Karl Weschke was born near Gera in Germany and spent much of his childhood in an orphanage. Captured as a young soldier, he was held as a prisoner of war at Radwinter near Cambridge, where lectures on art drew him to German Expressionism. He moved to Cornwall in 1955 and from 1960 lived in a house on Cape Cornwall, whose sea and cliffs became the setting of his dark, powerful paintings of bodies, animals and weather. Tate St Ives gave him a retrospective in 2003, two years before his death.