c. 1819–1918 · Art school

Düsseldorf School of Painting

In the 19th century, an academy on the Rhine became one of the most important training grounds for painters in Europe and America. Young artists came to Düsseldorf from Norway, Russia, the United States and the Baltic. What they learned there shaped landscape painting from the fjords to the Rocky Mountains.

A painting for America, made on the Rhine

In 1850, in a Düsseldorf studio, a German-American painter was at work on a huge history painting. It shows George Washington standing upright in a boat while his soldiers row across the ice-choked Delaware on Christmas night 1776. For the river, Emanuel Leutze took the Rhine as his model. His sitters included American visitors and art students, among them the painter Worthington Whittredge, and the Düsseldorf painter Andreas Achenbach also lent a hand.

The first version was damaged by a fire in the studio in 1850, restored and acquired by the Kunsthalle Bremen, where it was destroyed in an air raid in 1942. Leutze painted a second version, about 3.8 by 6.5 metres. It was exhibited in New York in the autumn of 1851, where more than 50,000 people saw it, and now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum. Washington Crossing the Delaware became one of the best-known images of American history, and yet it was created at a Prussian art academy.

An academy becomes a school

The Düsseldorf Academy was refounded in 1819 as the Royal Prussian Academy of Art, after the Rhineland had passed to Prussia. Its first director, the painter Peter von Cornelius, left for Munich in 1824. The decisive figure was his successor Wilhelm von Schadow, who directed the academy from 1826 to 1859. He brought a group of gifted pupils with him from Berlin, among them Carl Friedrich Lessing, Theodor Hildebrandt and Eduard Bendemann, and built up a structured curriculum of preparatory and master classes.

From this circle emerged what soon came to be called the “Düsseldorf School of Painting”. The term refers not to a single style but to a training and an attitude: careful study of nature, solid technique and pictures that tell stories.

Landscape as a speciality

Düsseldorf became internationally famous above all for landscape painting. In 1827 Johann Wilhelm Schirmer and Carl Friedrich Lessing founded an association for composing landscapes, and soon afterwards the academy established its own landscape class, which Schirmer shaped for decades. Landscape became the school’s most successful genre. Lessing painted snow-covered cloisters and sombre forests; the brothers Andreas and Oswald Achenbach painted dramatic coasts and sunlit Italian scenes.

This blend of close observation and heightened mood set the standard. Landscapes were not simply copied from nature but assembled in the studio from studies into large, effective compositions.

History, faith, everyday life

Alongside landscape, the academy cultivated history painting. Lessing’s Hussite Sermon of 1836, a scene from the Bohemian Reformation, sparked fierce debate because it was read as taking sides with Protestantism. At the same time a genre painting developed that depicted everyday scenes with humour and often with social criticism. Johann Peter Hasenclever was one of its best-known exponents. In 1848 Düsseldorf artists founded the Malkasten association, which still exists today.

From Düsseldorf to the world

What set the school apart was its reach. According to the Kunstpalast, more than 4,000 artists belonged to its orbit. From Norway came Hans Gude and Adolph Tidemand, who in 1848 jointly painted the Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord: Gude the fjord landscape, Tidemand the figures. The picture became an icon of Norwegian National Romanticism. Gude later took over Schirmer’s landscape class in Düsseldorf and then taught in Karlsruhe.

From the United States came Emanuel Leutze, Albert Bierstadt, Eastman Johnson and Worthington Whittredge. Bierstadt studied in Düsseldorf from 1853 to 1857 and later applied what he had learned to the vast landscapes of the American West. In New York, the merchant Johann Gottfried Böker opened the “Düsseldorf Gallery” in 1849, which exhibited and sold works by the school and made it popular with the American public. Painters from the Baltic, Russia, Switzerland and the Netherlands also studied on the Rhine. The Baltic German Eduard von Gebhardt became an influential professor of religious painting in Düsseldorf.

Women on the sidelines

At the academy, as at almost all state art schools in Germany, women were long denied a regular course of study. Painters such as the Dane Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, who worked in Düsseldorf around 1840, largely depended on private tuition. Only after the First World War were women regularly admitted to the Prussian academies.

Decline and rediscovery

From the 1870s onwards, Düsseldorf lost its pre-eminence. Munich and above all Paris attracted young painters, and Impressionism made the careful Düsseldorf manner look old-fashioned. Around 1900 Düsseldorf, too, opened up to modernism. The Sonderbund, founded in 1909, staged a major exhibition of the European avant-garde in Cologne in 1912.

For a long time the Düsseldorf School was considered staid. For some decades now it has been reassessed, above all because of its international influence. In 2011 the Kunstpalast devoted the major exhibition “Weltklasse” (World Class) to it. In its collection, newly presented since 2023, it gives the school a room of its own in a dense, salon-style hang.

Why it still matters

The Düsseldorf School is an early example of a global art education. A picture of the American Revolution, a Norwegian national icon and the landscapes of the American West share a common origin in the studios on the Rhine. For Düsseldorf it marks the beginning of a tradition that runs through Beuys and the Becher class to the present day.