Heinrich von Zügel

1850 Murrhardt/Germany – 1941  Munich

 

 

Heinrich von Zügel, a shepherd’s son, often during his childhood, herded the father’s sheep together with his older brother. His artistic talent showed very early, so that Zügel went to the Stuttgart Academy at the age of seventeen, already. In 1869 he moved to Munich to learn from animal painter Anton Braith, friends of the Diez School and Gotthard Kuehl. Since 1871 he exhibited his own important works publicly and received the great Gold Medal during the Vienna World Fair in 1873. In 1894 he was appointed to the Academy of Karlsruhe to become professor and, just one year later, to the Munich Academy, where he taught until 1922. Regularly during summer, the artist held open-air painting courses in Wörth at the Rhine. He went on study trips to Holland, Belgium, England and into the Luneburg Heath. Sheep and cattle in their natural habitat always were the main themes of his painting. While his early animal paintings were very close to the style of the ‘Gruenderzeit’, he soon turned to a more impressionist and loose manner of painting, which in particular thematized light effects and their colour changing power.

Since the turn of the century Heinrich von Zügel’s fame continuously increased and lasted for all his life. He counts as an important and internationally renowned animal painter, keeping up and modifying the tradition Otto Gebler’s and Anton Braith’s.