German family of artists and collectors. From c. 1820 to the late 1880s they played a leading role in the artistic life of Hamburg. Johann Michael Speckter (b Uthlede, nr Bremen, 5 July 1764; d Hamburg, 1 March 1845) gave up his original job as a businessman to devote himself entirely to his literary and artistic interests and to build up an extensive collection of old prints. His house in Hamburg became a meeting-place for scientists, art historians and poets. Such well-known painters as Julius Oldach, Carl Julius Milde and Friedrich Nerly (1807–78) were frequent visitors, and Speckter was a patron of Philipp Otto Runge. In 1818 he opened a lithographic printing firm, the Hamburger Steindruckerei Speckter & Herterich (from 1829 Speckter & Co.). In order to finance this operation, he had to sell the majority of his collection, which later formed the foundation of the Kupferstichkabinett of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. A mainstay of the lithography firm for many years was the painter Heinrich Joachim Herterich (1772–1852), who had learnt the new lithographic technique in Munich and who gave Johann Michael Speckter’s seven children their first drawing-lessons. Speckter’s two sons became artists. Erwin Speckter (b Hamburg, 18 June 1806; d Hamburg, 23 Dec 1835) studied with Siegfried Bendixen (1786–1864), Friedrich Carl Groeger (1766–1838) and Gerdt Hardorff the younger (1800–34) in Hamburg. In 1823, together with his younger brother Otto Speckter and Milde, he travelled in Schleswig-Holstein, where he was impressed with Hans Bruggermann’s Bordersholm altarpiece in Schleswig Cathedral (1521; in situ) and Hans Memling’s Passion triptych (1491; ex-Cathedral, Lübeck; Lübeck, St Annen-Mus.). In Lübeck he also met the Nazarene painter Friedrich Overbeck, whose Entry into Jerusalem (1808–24; destr. World War II) was then installed in the Marienkirche. From 1825 to 1827 Erwin studied with Peter Cornelius at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, although he was less influenced by Cornelius’s teaching than by Overbeck’s work. He returned to Hamburg in 1827 and painted Jacob and Rachel (1827; Hamburg, Ksthalle), a work rendered as finely as a miniature, the composition and luminous colour of which, almost free of shadow, is close to Overbeck’s early style. In 1830 he was commissioned to paint a wood-panelled cabinet for the country house of Syndikus Sieveking. His inspiration for this work came from reproductions of Runge’s Four Times of Day (1801–3; Hamburg, Ksthalle). From 1830 to 1834 Erwin was in Italy, where he recorded his impressions of the country, its people and its art in his letters (Briefe eines deutschen Künstlers aus Italien, Leipzig, 1846). In 1834 he returned to Hamburg but died the following year before he could carry out his ideas for paintings that he had formulated in Italy. Otto Speckter (b Hamburg, 9 Nov 1807; d Hamburg, 29 April 1871) was a lithographer, illustrator and painter. He received his entire training in Hamburg, after which he worked in his father’s company, illustrating such works as the poet Klaus Groth’s Quickborn (Hamburg, 1856). Otto’s son Hans Speckter (b Hamburg, 27 July 1848; d Lübeck, 29 Oct 1888) was a painter (e.g. Italian Landscape, 1887; Hamburg, Ksthalle), illustrator and writer.