(b Hannover, 22 Oct 1758; d Munich, 20 Aug 1835). German painter and engraver. The pupil of Adam Friedrich Oeser in Leipzig, of Giovanni Battista Casanova and Johann Elias Zeissig (1737–1806) in Dresden and of Anton Raphael Mengs in Rome (1777–9), he began by painting portraits for the German nobility. As a professor of the Kunstakademie in Berlin (1787), he returned to Rome to establish a Prussian school of art; the project did not materialize. In Rome he trained as a historical painter by drawing from Classical models, making plaster casts in the Académie de France and studying works above all by Raphael, the Carracci and Domenichino. However, his historical compositions were criticized for borrowing too heavily from the Rococo, and his harshly coloured Greek mythological scenes were berated for ‘stolen’ figures and motifs, for example in the Death of the Niobides (1801; Munich, Neue Pin.). Rehberg was, however, praised for his expressive and faithful portraits, such as Professor Carl Philipp Moritz (Berlin, Akad. Kst.) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1794; Weimar, Goethe-Mus.). In 1794 he published the Attitüden der Miss Emma Harte, engraved by Tommaso Piroli (1750–1824) after his drawings under the title Drawings Faithfully Copied from Nature at Naples and with Permission Dedicated to the Right Honorable Sir William Hamilton by his Most Humble Servant (e.g. Düsseldorf, Goethe-Mus.). He himself engraved a new edition of the Scherzi poetici et pittorici (Rome, 1795), in which the subjects were Anacreontic motifs of Venus and Cupid, executed in lyrical fashion in the tempera technique on his etchings. In 1820 he went to Munich, where he mainly explored the new technique of lithography and published his lithographic work Rafael Sanzio aus Urbino (Munich, 1824).