Anselm Feuerbach

Anselm Feuerbach (12 September 1829 – 4 January 1880) was a German painter. He was the leading classicist painter of the German 19th-century school.

Biography

Early life

Feuerbach was born at Speyer, the son of the well-known archaeologist Joseph Anselm Feuerbach and the grandson of the legal scholar Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach. The house of his birth today is a small museum.

Between 1845 and 1848 he attended the Düsseldorf Academy, where he was taught by Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, Wilhelm von Schadow and Carl Sohn. He went on to the Munich Academy, but in 1850, along with a number of other dissatisfied students, he moved to the academy at Antwerp, where he studied under Gustav Wappers. He moved to Paris in 1851, where he was a pupil of Thomas Couture until 1854. It was in Paris in that he produced his first masterpiece, Hafiz at the Fountain (1852).

In 1854, funded by Grand Duke Friedrich of Baden he visited Venice, where he fell under the spell of the greatest school of colourists, several of his works demonstrating a close study of the Italian masters. From there he continued to Florence and then Rome, where he was to remain, with brief visits back to Germany, until 1873. In 1861 he met Anna Risi (known as "Nanna"), who would be his model for the next four years. In 1866 she was succeeded as his principal model by Lucia Brunacci, an innkeeper's wife, who posed for his pictures of Medea. In 1862 Feuerbach met Count Adolf Friedrich von Schack, who commissioned copies of Italian old masters from him, and introduced him to Arnold Böcklin and Hans von Marées; the three artists became known as the Deutschrömer ("German Romans") due to their preference for Italian over German art.