Franz Schrader (geographer)

Jean Daniel François Schrader, better known as Franz Schrader, was a French mountaineer, geographer, cartographer and landscape painter, born January 11, 1844 in Bordeaux, died October 18, 1924 in Paris. He made an important contribution to the mapping of the Pyrenees and was highly considered among the pyreneists.

He is the son of Prussian Ferdinand Schrader from Magdeburg, who emigrated to Bordeaux, and of Marie-Louise Ducos, from a family of Nérac, and cousin of geographers Élisée and Onésime Reclus. He shows a talent for drawing from an early age. But his strict father, denying him the opportunity of higher education, places him as a pen pusher at a tax gatherer. Franz then finds another job in a trading house run by one of his father's friends, a situation where he can devote more time to broadening his literary and scientific knowledge.

In 1866, while staying with his friend Léonce Lourde-Rocheblave in Pau, he has a sort of revelation at the spectacle grandiose de la barrière montagneuse of the Pyrenees. His vocation strengthens when reading stories by Ramond de Carbonnières (1755-1827) (Les Voyages au Mont-Perdu - Travels to Monte Perdido) and by Henry Russell (1834-1909) (Les Grandes Ascensions des Pyrénées, guide d'une mer à l'autre - Great ascents of the Pyrenees, a guide from one sea to the other). While devoting the main part of his leisure to long hikes in the mountains, during which he gathers thousands of observations for his topographical records, he still finds time to paint numerous panoramas of the Pyrenees as well as the Alps which he also studies, and to acquire a solid formation in topography.

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