Carl ROTTMANN
Handschuhsheim 1797 - Munich 1850
Biography
Born near Heidelberg, the landscape painter and draughtsman Carl Rottmann received his initial artistic training from his father, Friedrich Rottmann, a professor of drawing at the University of Heidelberg. He settled in Munich in 1822, and there established his career, eventually coming to the attention of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. The King sponsored a study trip to Italy in 1826-1827, and Rottmann, who up to this point had only painted Bavarian views, was greatly inspired by his experience of the Italian countryside. On his return to Germany he painted twenty-eight frescoes of Italianate landscapes for the arcades of the Hofgarten, or Garden Court, in Munich, which were completed in 1833. (This cycle of landscape frescoes, which has suffered from exposure to the elements, is now in the Residenz in Munich, while Rottmann’s large preparatory cartoons for them are in the Hessisches Landesmusuem in Darmstadt.) Between 1834 and 1835 Rottmann travelled throughout Greece, again at the behest of his patron Ludwig, who had commissioned the artist to paint scenes of Hellenic landscapes for the Hofgarten. Rottmann’s series of twenty-three Greek views, painted between 1838 and 1850, are today in the collection of the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, although several were damaged during the Second World War. Rottmann died in 1850, at the age of fifty-three.
