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Düsseldorf school [Die Düsseldorfer Malerschule].
Group of painters studying and working from the mid-1820s to the 1860s in Germany at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie. Among the principal artists were Carl Friedrich Lessing, Ferdinand Theodor Hildebrandt (1804–74), Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, Johann Peter Hasenclever, Karl Wilhelm Hübner, Andreas Achenbach (1815–1910), Ludwig Knaus and Carl Ferdinand Sohn. Several had been pupils of Wilhelm Schadow in Berlin and had followed him to Düsseldorf after he became Director of the Kunstakademie in 1826. Schadow increased the prestige of the school, and his programme of instruction, which involved extreme naturalness of representation, attracted large numbers of students. By 1850 the school had replaced the Dresden Akademie as the favoured place in Germany to study art. Lessing, Hildebrandt and Hübner are best known for their large, carefully staged and somewhat melodramatic paintings of the 1830s and 1840s that often have political content, for example Lessing’s Hussite Sermon (1836; Düsseldorf, Kstmus.; on loan to Berlin, Alte N.G.). Achenbach and Schirmer were among those who painted landscapes, executing works in which a clear, often brittle, light helps to localize the scene, as in Schirmer’s German Landscape (1854; Essen, Mus. Folkwang). Group portraits, for example Sohn’s the Bendemann Family and their Friends (c. 1832; Krefeld, Kaiser-Wilhelm Mus.), are often cramped in composition and have sitters who only occasionally psychologically interact. The artists of the Düsseldorf school admired the subject-matter and the meticulous style of the Lukasbrüder and were also influenced by the Biedermeier painters, particularly Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller. Because of Düsseldorf’s proximity to the Netherlands, strong influences of the work of such 17th-century Dutch masters as Gerrit Dou and Gabriel Metsu and such contemporary Dutch and Belgian genre painters as Ferdinand De Braekeleer are also present in their work. By the 1850s much of the work produced by the Düsseldorf school consisted of sentimental and anecdotal genre scenes, for example Knaus’s The Cardsharp (1851; Düsseldorf, Kstmus.). This type of painting was practised well into the 1880s by some of the original members and their followers. The literal and precise painting taught at the Akademie attracted the Americans Richard Caton Woodville and Eastman Johnson. The Hungarian Mihály Munkácsy, the Swiss Benjamin Vautier and the Norwegian Adolph Tidemand also studied in Düsseldorf and took back to their respective countries the forthright style and approach learnt as students.
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