Born: 21.10.1865 in Pyritz (Pyrzyce, Poland)
died: 16.1.1944 in Wiesbaden

Hans Völcker, born the son of a pastor in Pomerania, went to Berlin to study in 1885. After two years at the Königliche Kunstschule and one year at the Königliche akademische Hochschule für die bildenden Künste, he was a master student of the Norwegian landscape painter Hans Fredrik Gude (1825 - 1903) from 1889 to 1891. In his studio he met Walter Leistikow (1865 - 1908), also a master student and co-founder of the Berlin Secession in 1899. In Berlin, Völcker also met his future wife Johanna née Hindersin (1861 - 1958) from Stettin, who was also a student at the Royal School of Art for three years and subsequently worked mainly in the applied arts. Völcker's further career took him to Munich in 1894 and finally to Wiesbaden in 1899, where he exerted a significant influence on the art world as a respected "art painter" until his death.

As early as 1901, he was a founding member of the Wiesbaden Society for Fine Arts, which saw the promotion of contemporary art as its primary task. He also opened a painting school on Schillerplatz, which ran from around 1902 to 1908. After an extended stay in South Africa in 1905/06, he became a member of the art committee that organized the "First Great Art Exhibition Wiesbaden 1909". Together with the Wiesbaden architects Friedrich Werz and Paul Huber, he planned an art gallery, which was built near the new main railway station. He designed a glass mosaic for the vestibule and the overall furnishings for twelve of the 16 halls. He was also represented in the exhibition itself with several works.

Further prestigious commissions from the city followed until the First World War. The paintings of the mourning hall of the southern cemetery and the first floor vestibule of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Bad (now the Kaiser-Friedrich-Therme), for whose entire interior design he was also responsible, have been completely preserved to this day. Völcker's decorative design of the coffered ceiling and the ceiling frieze in the reading room of the Hessian State Library have not survived, and only rudimentary work remains in the painterly decoration of the gallery rooms of the Wiesbaden Museum. While the impressive, large-format figure compositions of the preserved wall decorations show echoes of Art Nouveau and Symbolism, the rest of his extensive painterly oeuvre - primarily landscapes and still lifes - also reflects his engagement with the contemporary art movements of Impressionism and Expressionism.

From 1919, Völcker maintained a joint studio with Edmund Fabry, Josef Vinecký and Li Vinecký-Thorn (1867 - 1952) at Nikolasstraße 17, now Bahnhofstraße 39, where he also gave private lessons in art and applied arts.

After the merger of the Wiesbadener Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst and the Nassauischer Kunstverein e.V. in 1917, Völcker, who had regularly contributed to the Kunstverein's exhibitions since 1905/06 and had organized the successful "Great Wiesbaden Art Exhibition" on the occasion of the opening of the new museum in 1915, was appointed to the board as exhibition director, to which he belonged for many years, most recently as deputy chairman from 1937. The association honored him in 1940 with an exhibition on the occasion of his 75th birthday and in the year of his death with a memorial exhibition.

Hans Völcker is buried in the South Cemetery. Paintings by him can be found in the Wiesbaden Museum and the Wiesbaden City Museum, among others.