Carl Blechen (1798 – 1840) was a professor at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. This German landscape painter had a distinctive style which was characteristic of the Romantic ideals of natural beauty. His father was a minor tax official from Regensberg. Blechen attended the Lyceum at the Oberkirche St. Nikolai from 1805 to 1815. Since his parents were poor and therefore could not afford to pay for him to further his education, they apprenticed him to a banker with whom he worked until 1822, when he joined the Berlin Academy after an increasing interest in art could not let him continue with his apprenticeship. After a short study trip to Saxon Switzerland and Dresden, he returned to Berlin and was engaged as a decorator of the Royal Theater on the Alexanderplatz.
In 1827, he became a member of the Berlin Artists’ Association, and later in the same year he was dismissed from the Theater due to an ongoing dispute with Henriette Sontag who was a singer. After that, Blechen tried to earn a living as a freelance artist. In 1828, he took a study trip to the Baltic Sea which he followed by another trip to Italy. These trips resulted into hundreds of sketches that he later elaborated in his studio in Berlin. The landscapes he had seen during his trips deeply impressed him and altered his entire manner of painting to reflect what he had seen. In 1831 he was appointed Professor of Landscape Painting at the Berlin Academy upon the recommendation of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. He became a full member of the Academy in 1835 and took a study trip to Paris.
