Düsseldorf school

Düsseldorf school, painters who studied at the Düsseldorf Academy (now Düsseldorf State Academy of Art) and whose work showed the influence of its insistence on hard linearism and elevated subject matter. The academy of painting in Düsseldorf was founded in 1767 and attracted students from throughout Europe and the United States from the early 1830s through the 1860s.

During the period of its greatest allure, the academy was directed by Wilhelm von Schadow, and many followers of the Nazarenes (a group that looked to early Renaissance styles and emphasized religious subject matter) were on the faculty. This, in large measure, accounts for the theatrical compositions common to the school’s students of history painting. The Düsseldorf school’s basic style combines elements of the linearism and drawing techniques of the Neoclassicists with the subject matter and gesture of the Romantics. Colour and texture were suspect, and a concentration on drawings and organized composition was stressed. Emanual Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) is an example of this style.

In the mid-19th century the American contingent of students at Düsseldorf was so large that the academy was looked on as a normal experience for the American art student. Such notable American painters as George Caleb Bingham, Albert Bierstadt, and Worthington Whittredge studied there and subsequently passed on an appreciation of the hard-edged, meticulous lines of the Düsseldorf school to countless other American painters.