Oswald Achenbach

Oswald Achenbach ( 1827-1905 )

Oswald Achenbach (2 February 1827 – 1 February 1905) was a German painter associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting. Though little known today, during his lifetime he was counted among the most important landscape painters of Europe. Through his teaching activities, he influenced the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. His brother, Andreas Achenbach, who was twelve years older, was also among the most important German landscape painters of the 19th century. The two brothers were humorously called "the A and O of Landscapes" (a reference to their initials matching a common German reference to the Alpha and Omega).

Courbet's radical Realism inspired Achenbach and a number of other German painters. The so-called "Leibl-Circle" (after painter Wilhelm Leibl), including Wilhelm Trübner, Carl Schuch, Johann Sperl and for a while also Hans Thoma had intensely debated Courbet's works among themselves and were inspired to adopt a "pure painting" technique. In particular Leibl developed a brushwork technique by which the particular material of the object represented was ignored, thereby already pointing in the direction of abstraction.

By contrast, Achenbach was radical in his brushwork and application of paint but maintained the formal criteria of traditional composition. This leads to a very different art historical classification of Achenbach. Some see him as an artist who persisted in a fully developed style and for that reason stagnated. Other art historians cast Achenbach in a mediating role because he presented traditional values in his own style and moved in the direction of modernity. It is undisputed that his early landscapes were pioneering. However, as early as the start of the 20th century, he was seen as a painter who in his later works catered to public tastes and turned into a typical representative of the Gründerzeit period.

Achenbach's work consists of around 2,000 paintings. Approximately two-thirds are privately owned. His works are in the collections of many museums, mainly in Germany but also across Europe and America including the Musee d'Orsay and the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.