Biography

German painter, teacher and writer, son of Johann Gottfried Schadow. He studied at the Berlin Akademie from 1805 and in 1806 showed paintings at the annual Akademie exhibition. Under his teacher, Friedrich Georg Weitsch, he quickly became a skilled portrait painter, and by 1810 he was commissioned to paint portraits of members of the Prussian royal family and of the Empress of Austria. Influenced by the English artist John Flaxman, Schadow developed an emphasis on outline. In 1810 Schadow went with his brother Ridolfo Schadow to Rome, where in 1813 he became a member of the Lukasbrüder and, in 1814, a Catholic.

In 1815-17 he took part, with Peter von Cornelius, Friedrich Overbeck and Philipp Veit, in the commission for frescoes of the Story of Joseph for a room in the Casa Bartholdy (now Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie). In his continuing interest in portraits, Schadow differed from his colleagues. Following the example of Gottlieb Schick and similarly inspired by Raphael, Schadow developed a poetic style of portraiture. In 1819 he returned to Berlin in order to help Karl Friedrich Schinkel with the decoration of the Schauspielhaus. He took over the running of a studio and won a high degree of respect as a painter and teacher. Schadow's decorative painting was often combined with an idealistic and intellectual element, as in Poetry (1825; Potsdam, Neues Palais), a winged figure standing on clouds over a coastal landscape writing the names of poets on a tablet while gazing upwards.

In 1826 he was appointed director of the Dusseldorf Academy. In 1837 the director selected, at request, those of his scholars best qualified to decorate the chapel of St Apollinaris on the Rhine with frescoes, which when finished were accepted as the fullest and purest manifestation of the Düsseldorf school on its spiritual side. Schadow's fame rests less on his own creations than on the school he formed.