(b Heidelberg, 16 May 1820; d Munich, 21 May 1879). Painter and draughtsman, brother of (1) Ernst Fries. In his youth he was inspired by the paintings in his father’s collection by his elder brother Ernst and by Carl Rottmann and the Scottish painter George Augustus Wallis (1770–1847), who was active for some time in Heidelberg. Bernhard Fries studied figure drawing in Karlsruhe with the Nazarene painter Carl Koopmann (1797–1894), and in 1835 he entered the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, leaving two years later to pursue landscape painting in Italy, where he stayed intermittently until 1846. He was trained in the traditions of Neo-classicism and Romanticism but developed a greater realism in his work through his study at the Staatliche Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, from 1840 to 1843 with Johann Wilhelm Schirmer and Andreas Aschenbach (1815–1910). In 1848 Bernhard Fries went to Geneva, due to the political situation in Germany, and became acquainted with Alexandre Calame. As he was a Democrat, Bernhard was banned from Bavaria, and on his return to Germany in 1852 he therefore lived again in Heidelberg, developing a free style in small, intimate landscapes of the region of the Neckar River (e.g. Farmhouses at Schlierbach, 1852; Heidelberg, Kurpfälz. Mus.). In 1853–4 he was again in Rome and then moved back to Munich, where, influenced by Rottmann’s landscape murals (1830–33) in the arcade of the Hofgarten, he planned and partly executed a series of paintings with Italian views, such as the Oreto Valley, Palermo (Munich, Schack-Gal.). Due to the loss of his assets, Fries had to take into account public taste; these works, therefore, are an often unsuccessful combination of fresh impressions of nature and Rottmann’s luminism. Fries’s later paintings give greater evidence of his own style, combining realistic elements and atmospheric values.

Part of the Fries family

• Fries, (Jacob Daniel Georg Gottlieb) Bernhard
  • Fries