GÄRTNER, Eduard

German painter. He studied with Carl Gropius, a decorative painter and friend of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. He attended the Berlin Academy, and painted at the Berlin Porcelain Manufactory. Prussia's king had also sent him for special landscape study in Paris under Ingres's friend François Edouard Bertin.

He was one the painters of the BiedermeierGLOSSARYTerm applied to a style characteristic of much German and Austrian art and interior decoration in the period roughly between the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) and the Year of Revolutions (1848). The name derives from a fictional character called Gottlieb Biedermaier (sic) from the journal Fliegende Elssner (Flying Leaves), who personified the solid yet philistine qualities of the bourgeois middle classes, and the art to which he lent his name eschewed flights of the imagination in favour of sobriety, domesticity, and often sentimentality. There were, as is to be expected, no major painters associated with Biedermeier but many excellent practitioners, such as Waldmüller. The term is sometimes extended to cover the work of artists in other countries. period - the founding fathers of photography - who sought a shortcut to portraiture and other tasks through their optical research. Often these artists were employed in the production of elaborately illusionistic topographical panoramas known as dioramas. Among the finest of these is one in Berlin, by Eduard Gärtner, painted for Frederick William IV of Prussia atop Schinkel's Friedrichswerderkirche (1843, Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin).