Franz Ludwig Catel

Catel grew up in a French Huguenot family in Berlin and as a youth assisted in carving wooden figures at his father's toy store. After attending the Berlin academy and making watercolors and book illustrations, he went to Paris in 1807 where he studied oil painting at the École des Beaux-Arts until leaving for Rome in 1811. There he befriended neoclassicist landscape painter Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839), mythological painter Jakob Asmus Carstens (1754-1798), and the group of German paint-ers called the Nazarenes. Catel's own work mostly consisted of landscape panoramas and Neapolitan folk...