Friedrich Wilhelm Kuhnert Biography | Oil Painting

At the age of seventeen, Friedrich Wilhelm Kuhnert began a technical and commercial apprenticeship, but he quit, never finishing the courses. But when he was nineteen, Kuhnert got a scholarship at the Berlin University of the Arts and studied there from 1883 to 1887.

He provided illustrations for the 1900 edition of Brehms Tierleben. In 1901 Friedrich Wilhelm Kuhnert was the animal illustrator for zoologist Johann Wilhelm Haacke's book Animal Life on Earth and in 1903, he became one of the many artists to do illustrations and design trading cards for the chocolate company Stollwerck in Cologne.

From his home in Berlin, he traveled to Scandinavia, Egypt, East Africa, and India to make landscape and animal studies, his favorite being the African lion. While his peers sketched animals from the zoos, Kuhnert sketched tropical animals in their wild habitat on location. He made pictures by sketching, etching, watercolor, and oil painting.

Friedrich Wilhelm Kuhnert was considered then and is still known today as one of the most important German animal painters. Not only a painter and illustrator but also an amateur hunter, Kuhnert often accepted great adversity and took a great deal of effort to track down and paint the animals in their natural environments.

Art Movement: Realism.
He Traveled To Scandinavia, Egypt, East Africa, India, Ceylon, Switzerland.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.