9 facts about Eduard Hildebrandt

Eduard Hildebrandt (9 September 1818 in Danzig – 25 October 1868 in Berlin) was a German landscape painter.

He served as apprentice to his father, a house-painter at Danzig. He was not twenty next he moved to Berlin, where he was taken in hand by Wilhelm Krause, a painter of sea pieces. Several in advance pieces exhibited after his death—a breakwater, dated 1838, ships in a breeze off Swinemünde (1840), and supplementary canvases of this and the considering year—show Hildebrandt to have been a cautious student of nature, with instinctive talents kept alongside by the conventionalisms of the formal researcher to which Krause belonged.

Accident made him acquainted following masterpieces of French art displayed at the Berlin Academy, and these awakened his curiosity and envy. He went to Paris, where, about 1842, he entered the atelier of Isabey and became the companion of Lepoittevin. In a unexpected time he sent house pictures which might have been taken for copies from these artists. Gradually he mastered the mysteries of adjoin and the secrets of effect in which the French at this period excelled.

He plus acquired the critical skill in painting figures, and returned to Germany, skilled in the rendering of many kinds of landscape forms. His pictures of French street life, done roughly 1843, while impressed next the stamp of the Paris school, reveal a spirit aflame for novelty, quick at grasping, equally Fast at rendering, momentary changes of sky and atmosphere.

After 1843 Hildebrandt, under the change of Humboldt, extended his travels, and in 1864-1865 he went round the world. Whilst his experience became greater than before his powers of captivation broke down. He lost the taste for detail in seeking for scenic breadth, and a fatal gift of hand diminished the value of his works for everything those who see for composition and pact of hue as essential concomitants of expose and touch.

In oil he gradually produced less, in water colours more, than at first, and his fame must rest upon the sketches which he made in the latter form, many of them represented by chromolithography. Fantasies in red, yellow and opal, sunset, sunrise and moonshine, distances of hundreds of miles gone those of the Andes and the Himalaya, narrow streets in the bazaars of Cairo or Suez, panoramas as seen from mast-heads, wide cities as soon as Bombay or Pekin, narrow strips of desert following measure-less expanses of skyall alike display his mood of bravura. Hildebrandt died at Berlin on 25 October 1868.

Media connected to Eduard Hildebrandt at Wikimedia Commons