Johann Wilhelm Schirmer - Buy or sell works
5 September 1807, Jülich (Germany) - 11 September 1863, Karlsruhe (Germany)
Johann Wilhelm Schirmer was a German landscape painter of the Düsseldorf School. After training in Düsseldorf and travelling to the Netherlands and Northern France, he embarked on a journey to Italy in 1840. The oil sketches and drawings he executed during the aforementioned trips would subsequently serve him as his personal image reservoir, becoming the basis of his oil paintings.
Schirmer was especially fascinated by the colours and graphic features of different types of tree, and for this reason he completed a number of studies of this subject.
From about 1840 onwards, Schirmer devoted himself to painting idealised landscapes with religious figural staffage. He thus succeeded in combining classic landscape painting with the more highly regarded genre of history painting. Such synthesis allowed Schirmer to go beyond the “inferior” genre of landscape painting and establish himself as a more respectable artist. This change probably took place in connection with his appointment to the post of director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe.