"Er war ein heiterer Lebemann, dessen leichtes erfreuliches Talent in Paris die rechte Schule gefunden hatte [He was a cheerful, pleasure-seeking man whose graceful and delightful talent had found its best training-ground in Paris]."(1) Goethe's words about his friend Georg Melchior Kraus ring true in the present drawing, which combines the new genre subjects of Greuze with a lively technique.

Born in 1733, Kraus was the son of a tavernkeeper and wine merchant in Frankfurt am Main.(2) This seemingly humble origin is belied by other relationships that had bearing on his choice of profession and his later life: through his mother, he was related to painters at the Saxon court, and Goethe's grandparents served as her godparents.(3) As peripatetic as his forebears, Kraus moved to Kassel for his first training under Johann Heinrich Tischbein the Elder, then in 1761 to Paris. Here he met François Boucher and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, both of whom influenced his technique and style. Following his return from the French capital in 1766, he travelled in northern Germany and, in 1770–71, Switzerland. He secured an appointment as drawing tutor to a young noblewoman, Jeanette Louise von Stein and, following her marriage, moved with the household to their lands in Thuringia and later the court city of Weimar. Having met Goethe there by 1774, Kraus became the poet's friend and drawing instructor as well. These years saw the enterprising young artist established as director of the new Herzogliche Freie Zeichenschule in 1775. After his appointment he turned to landscape more and more and made a drawing trip to the Harz mountains in Goethe's company in 1784. A prolific printmaker as well, Kraus drew on his sharp eye for landscape and costume, providing illustrations for Friedrich Justin Bertuch's Journal des Luxus und der Moden from 1786 until his death in 1806.

The Crocker Young Woman Eating reflects the training Kraus received in France, especially in the vigorous use of red chalk, reinforced at key points and hatched with slashing parallels. The handling is similar to other drawings of single figures dated to the Paris period, for example the Man reading and Seated woman now in Frankfurt,(4) though both of these are in black and white chalk on blue paper. The subject is simple: a bonneted young woman, her elbow propped on a table and her foot on a charcoal-heated footwarmer, holds glass and plate over her apron as she gazes into the middle distance, seemingly about to speak. Her costume and demeanor reflect the lower middle classes as depicted by Greuze, though without the latter's moralizing tone.

Kraus's watercolor in Lübeck of a Mother with Three Children(5) is closer in theme to Greuze. In this scene of family life, the German artist replicates the Crocker figure, though transforming it through changes in detail and setting. The matron's head is now closer to profile, the footwarmer has become a footstool, the glass has disappeared, and her youngest child now reaches into her lap to play with the dish. The neutral background has now become a rustic kitchen where the family is surrounded by piles of clothes, firewood, and onions hanging from a shelf. As in the Crocker drawing, the tone of the watercolor is greyish-blue.

It seems, then, that the Crocker drawing is preparatory to the Lübeck watercolor, being a spontaneous single-figure study done from a model that the artist then incorporated into a larger composition. The watercolor is dated 1766 in the artist's hand, so that the Crocker red chalk, similarly signed but not dated, must have been done near that time, late in the period of his Paris training.