Carl Friedrich Lessing Biography | Oil Paintings

Carl Friedrich Lessing was a pupil of Heinrich Anton Dahling at the Berlin Academy and first devoted himself to landscape painting. In this period of his artistic career, Lessing was influenced by the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, the themes he depicted were castle ruins, forgotten cemeteries, rugged rock formations, which he inhabited with figures of monks, knights, and thieves. In 1826 he obtained a prize with his Cemetery in a Wood.

He accompanied Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow to Düsseldorf, where he continued his studies, devoting himself to historical paintings. In 1830, when Schadow went to Italy, Carl Friedrich Lessing occupied his place as director of the Academy, exercising great influence on the Düsseldorf School of painting. His oil painting Das Trauernde Konigspaar (Royal Couple Mourning for their Dead Daughter) brought him great popularity. In 1837, he received a gold medal at Paris, he was a member of the Berlin Academy and was the recipient of several orders. In 1858 he was appointed the director of the gallery at Karlsruhe, where he continued his activity as a painter until he died in 1880.

Carl Friedrich Lessing stands between Idealism and Realism, his romantic and poetic form of conception has been combined with a thorough study of nature. None of the contemporaries depicted the German forest and the wild rocky regions so poetically and at the same time as natural. Lessing was also known and loved by the general public through countless reproductions in the early Wilhelminian period magazines.

Artists Influencing Carl Friedrich Lessing: Heinrich Anton Dahling, Caspar David Friedrich
He Traveled To Italy
Artist Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.