Rudolf Lehmann

Rudolf Lehmann was born in 1819 in Ottensen, a town that today is part of the German city of Hamburg. His father was a painter and so from a young age he was exposed to the world of art. He was a student of the masters Peter von Cornelius and Wilhelm von Kaulbach, who trained both him and his brother Henri, before they both went to Paris to attend the Academy of Fine Arts.

He also travelled to Rome on a study trip, where he continued his artistic research. As evidence of this stay in the Eternal City, we remember the painting Charity, which depicts a Roman beggar with her two children on the steps of a church, and Roman Girl in a White Blouse, both painted in 1863. These works are executed in a language that recalls romanticism, with soft, delicate colours.

He also painted a series of canvases depicting young girls at work, such as Selling Grapes, Spinning and Gathering Wheat.

One of the most famous paintings he produced is The Blessing of Pope Sixtus V on the Pontine Marshes, a canvas that was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1846 and purchased by the French government.

The painter then travelled to Great Britain and settled in London in 1866 where he worked on numerous portraits. Here he married the daughter of Scottish author Robert Chambers. During his career he painted the Portrait of his father Leo, thePortrait of Robert Browning, a British poet and playwright, now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, and the Portrait of Miss Emily Leo, kept at the Musée d’arts de Nantes.

Some of his paintings are now in the British Museum in London. He died in Boumemede, Bushey, in 1905 at the age of seventy-six.

His works are priced from €300 up to an auction record of around €47,000 in 2000.