Christian Friedrich Gille

Gille, who was born in the Harz Mountains, came to Dresden at the age of 20 to be trained as a landscape copper engraver at the academy there. In 1827 he turned to painting and became a pupil of the Norwegian Johann Christian Clausen Dahl for the next three years. After his studies Gille worked as a lithographer for lack of a perspective as a painter, completed a “Bilderchronik” (picture chronicle) for the Saxon Art Society and produced a number of portraits of important Dresden personalities.
After his first attempts as a landscape painter at the end of the 1820s, Gille lived in Dresden until his death, but it was not until around 1850 that he was able to devote himself more freely to this genre, supported by purchases from the Kunstverein. He found his motifs in the surroundings of Dresden – often simple trees and shrubs or streams and small waterfalls, which he captured in watercolours and oil studies. Still touched by the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Gustav Carus and Dahl, Gille consistently took the Romantic understanding of nature in the direction of realism in his unconventional oil studies created in front of nature. His talent for observing the inconspicuous made him an unsentimental depictor of nature, committed solely to reality. Hardly noticed during his lifetime, today his numerous oil studies and sketches are regarded as testimonies to a landscape realism that leads directly to the modernism of the late 19th century.