son of painter Johann Georg Pforr
with father and uncle (Johann Heinrich Tischbein the Younger); Vienna Academy (Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, 1805)
1805 – enters Vienna Academy; volunteers as a guard in Vienna militia; suffers nervous breakdown
1806 – returns to Vienna Academy
1809 – co-founds Nazarenes (Lukasbund) with Friedrich Overbeck, Ludwig Vogel, Joseph Wintergerst, Joseph Sutter and Johann Konrad Hottinger
1810 – moves to Rome with Nazarenes
1812 - drowns
Rome (1810-12)
St. George and the Dragon, c. 1809-10 (Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt)
Shulamit and Maria, 1811 (Schafer Collection, Schweinfurt)
Andrews, Keith. The Nazarenes: A Brotherhood of German Painters in Rome. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964
Frank, Mitchell Benjamin. German Romantic Painting Redefined. Nazarene Tradition and the Narratives of Romanticism. Aldershot, UK-Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001.
Grewe, Cordula. Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009
Morowitz, Laura. Artistic Brotherhoods in the Nineteenth Century. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000
Vaughan, William. German Romanticism and English Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979