Born in Reading, Ohio, Carl Krafft became a prolific regionalist painter of Midwestern subjects, primarily impressionist landscapes and some seascapes. He also did some genre works including men at work at river-boat landings.

Kraftt had his studio in Oak Park, Illinois and from there traveled to the surrounding countryside as well as to Brown County, Indiana, and the Ozarks of south-central Missouri. In the Ozarks, he and Rudolph Ingerle, who first visited the mountainous region in 1912, created a major art colony called the Society of Ozark Painters. Painters were attracted there because they were enchanted by the dramatic landscape of the region and "the delicate color of its hazy atmosphere". The appeal of the ...