(b Bernau im Schwarzwald, 2 Oct 1839; d Karlsruhe, 7 Nov 1924). German painter, printmaker and museum director. He was the son of a miller, craftsman and smallholder and studied briefly as a lithographer in Basle in 1854 before being apprenticed to a watchcase painter in Furtwangen. Returning home the same year, he started to draw and paint in his spare time. In 1859 he enrolled at the Kunstschule in Karlsruhe, where he studied until 1866 with Ludwig Des Coudres (1820-78) and the landscape painter Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, by whom he was especially influenced. He spent his summer vacations drawing and painting in Bernau, and his landscapes, portraits and genre pictures from this time record his transition from amateur painter to accomplished artist. His pictures of his mother and his sister Agathe, which he produced from c. 1864 onwards, show increasing similarities with the painterly realism of contemporary French painting (e.g. the double portrait of his Mother and Sister Reading the Bible, 1866; Karlsruhe, Staatl. Ksthalle).

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