Biography

German painter. He studied with Carl Gropius, a decorative painter and friend of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. He attended the Berlin Academy, and painted at the Berlin Porcelain Manufactory. Prussia's king had also sent him for special landscape study in Paris under Ingres's friend François Edouard Bertin.

He was one the painters of the Biedermeier period - the founding fathers of photography - who sought a shortcut to portraiture and other tasks through their optical research. Often these artists were employed in the production of elaborately illusionistic topographical panoramas known as dioramas. Among the finest of these is one in Berlin, by Eduard Gärtner, painted for Frederick William IV of Prussia atop Schinkel's Friedrichswerderkirche (1843, Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin).