Karl Friedrich Schinkel

Born: Neuruppin, Brandenburg, 13 March 1781

Died: Berlin, 9 October 1841

Nationality: German


Works by this Artist

Medieval City on a River
Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1815

Background

son of Lutheran pastor

Studies

with architect David Gilly (1798); with Friedrich and David Gilly and Carl Gotthard Langhans at Berlin Bauakademie (architecture academy, 1799)

Career

1808-15 – produces 45 large-scale panoramas

1813 – collaborates with Frederick William III (King of Prussia) on design of Prussian honorific military medal, the Iron Cross

Travels

Rome (1803-04; 1824); London (1826)

Commissions from

Louise (Queen of Prussia); Frederick William III, William I, Frederick
Wiliiam IV (kings of Prussia); Prince Albert (England)

Important Artworks

Set designs for Mozart’s Magic Flute, 1815-16

Altes Museum, 1823-30 (architecture, Berlin)

Neues Schauspielhaus, now Konzerthaus, 1819-21 (architect, Berlin)

Bauakademie, 1831-35 (architect, Berlin, destroyed 1961)

Portraits of Schinkel

Franz Louis Catel, Karl Friedrich Schinkel in Naples, 1824 (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin)

Readings

Saul, Nicholas. The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009

Snodin, Michael. Karl Friedrich Schinkel: a Universal Man. Exhibition catalogue. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991

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