Who is Ferdinand von Arnim?

Heinrich Ludwig Ferdinand von Arnim (15 September 1814 – 23 March 1866) was a German architect and watercolour-painter. He was a student of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and mainly worked in Berlin and Potsdam.

Arnim was born in Treptow an der Rega in Pomerania (present-day Trzebiatów, Poland), the son of Prussian Captain Friedrich Ludwig von Arnim and his wife Henriette, née Gadebusch. He trained as a house surveyor and studied architecture at the Royal Prussian Building School (Bauakademie) in Berlin amongst 1833 and 1838. Having completed his studies, he joined the Berlin Architects’ Association in 1839, from 1840 he worked as site foreman under Friedrich Ludwig Persius and in 1844 was appointed building inspector official.

Upon Persius’ death in 1845, Arnim became a aficionado of the Berlin City Palace building committee under Friedrich August Stüler and house architect of the Hohenzollern prince Charles of Prussia at his address in Klein-Glienicke. He was employed from 1846 as a teacher, from 1857 as a professor at the Bauakademie in Berlin and achieved the title of a court architect in 1849. From 1855 to 1863 Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau employed him to rebuild the palace and gardens of Branitz (near Cottbus). 1862 saw him become the advisor upon courtly architecture in the Potsdam department of Ludwig Ferdinand Hesse (1795–1876).

Arnim died in Berlin in 1866 at the age of 51. He was entombed in the allowance of the Potsdam-Bornstedt cemetery (near the tomb of his mentor Ludwig Persius); nearby were buried the well-known Sello relatives of court gardeners.