Carl Spitzweg

Born the middle of three sons of a wealthy merchant, the boy showed an early interest in art and a distinct talent for drawing. Nevertheless, from 1825 he first completed an apprenticeship with Franz Xaver Pettenkofer at the Munich court pharmacy, followed by pharmacy studies at Munich University. Having become financially independent through his father’s inheritance, he decided as early as 1833, during a stay at a health resort after overcoming an illness, to devote himself entirely to art. As an autodidact, he trained himself by copying mainly Dutch paintings in the Alte Pinakothek, but also by exchanging ideas with artists such as Eduard Schleich, Christian Morgenstern and Friedrich Voltz. He regularly exhibited his paintings at the Munich Kunstverein, where he soon made a name for himself with his humorous genre paintings. A trip to the Paris World’s Fair and to London, which he undertook together with Eduard Schleich in 1851, had a great influence on the development of his style. Under the influence of the paintings of the Barbizon School, but also of John Constable and William Turner, his palette brightened up and his brushwork became looser. In addition to the popular Biedermeier scenes from the lives of the little burghers, he now painted landscapes full of a lyrical sense of nature, the motifs for which he found on numerous hikes through Upper Bavaria. Carl Spitzweg died in Munich in 1885, highly honoured.