Philipp Hackert

After having been given a basic artistic education by his father and uncle, who were both painters, Jakob Philipp Hackert attended the drawing classes of Blaise Nicholas le Sueur (1716-1783), the director of the Berlin Academy, in 1758. With an early interest in landscape painting, Hackert began copying the works of Claude Lorrain (1600-1682) and Dutch seventeenth-century artists. He traveled in northern Germany where he received commissions for decorative cycles in Stralsund and Rügen, and in 1764 he visited Sweden. From 1765 until 1768 Hackert lived in Paris, where he met landscape and...