German painter, known for his genreGLOSSARYIn a broad sense, the term is used to mean a particular branch or category of art; landscape and portraiture, for example, are genres of painting, and the essay and the short story are genres of literature. and history paintings. At the age of 15, he and his younger brother Heinrich left Dusseldorf with their family and came to Munich. There he studied at the Academy from 1809 to 1814, soon however distancing himself from supporters of the classicalGLOSSARYRelating to the culture of ancient Greece and Rome (classical Antiquity). The classical world played a profoundly important role in the Renaissance, with Italian scholars, writers, and artists seeing their own period as the rebirth (the "renaissance") of classical values after the Middle Ages. The classical world was considered the golden age for the arts, literature, philosophy, and politics. Concepts of the classical, however, changed greatly from one period to the next. Roman literature provided the starting point in the 14th century, scholars patiently finding, editing and translating a wide range of texts. In the 15th century Greek literature, philosophy and art - together with the close study of the remains of Roman buildings and sculptures-expanded the concept of the classical and ensured it remained a vital source of ideas and inspiration..
As a young painter he captured the campaign battles against Napoleon. In 1816-17 he undertook a study trip to Italy, during which time he discovered his stylistic preference for combing Italian landscape with rustic genre scenes. In his genre-landscapes Hess moved toward a sort of 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. realismGLOSSARYRealism (with an upper case "R"), also known as the Realist school, denotes a mid-nineteenth century art movement and style in which artists discarded the formulas of Neoclassicism and the theatrical drama of Romanticism to paint familiar scenes and events as they actually looked. Typically it involved some sort of sociopolitical or moral message, in the depiction of ugly or commonplace subjects. One of the main representatives and spokesmen was the painter Gustave Courbet. In the dispute about ways to represent reality, Realism rebelled against the idealistic and classicist tendencies in painting., which was, in equal measure, true to nature as well as idealized. In 1820 he was named Bavarian Court Painter. In 1824 he was one of the founding members of the Munich Kunstverein (artist guildGLOSSARYAn association of the masters of a particular craft, trade or profession (painters, goldsmiths, surgeons, and so on) set up to protect its members' rights and interests. Such guilds existed in virtually every European city in the 16th century. The guild also monitored standards of work, acted as a court for those who brought their trade into disrepute, and provided assistance to members in need.), which soon became a forum for a more civic minded approach to art.
Hess was a popular painter of battles and historical scenes and painted extensive battle cycles for Munich's King Ludwig I, as well as for Czar Nicholas I in St. Petersburg. Today his monumental scenes often seem to be overtly theatrical; however, on closer look, they hold a certain fascination due to their very precise attention to detail.
