HÜBNER, Julius - b. 1806 Oels, d. 1882 Loschwitz

German painter and poet (Rudolf Julius Benno Hübner). He studied at the Academy in Berlin with Wilhelm von Schadow. He first attracted attention by his picture of Ruth and Boaz (1825). He traveled in Italy and resided for the most part at Düsseldorf until 1839. In that year he settled at Dresden, becoming a professor in the Academy of Arts in 1841 and director of the Gallery of Paintings in 1871. He obtained the great gold medal at Brussels in 1851.

Among his works in the Düsseldorf period are: The Fisherman (1828), after Goethe’s ballad; Ruth and Naomi (1833) in the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Christ and the Evangelists (1835), Job and his Friends (1838), Portrait of Frederick III in Frankfurt.

To his Dresden period belong: Golden Age; Dispute between Luther and Dr. Eck (1866); Last Days of Frederick the Great; Cupid in Winter.

He was the father of Emil Hübner, a distinguished classical scholar.

Carl Friedrich Lessing, Carl Sohn, and Theodor Hildebrandt

Friendship pictures, a tradition going back to Holbein, were revived in the nineteenth century. One of these, by Julius H�bner, shows the painters Carl Friedrich Lessing, Carl Sohn, and Theodor Hildebrandt. Their trompe l’oeil, inscribed frame recalls those of Jan van Eyck, the pictorial format is close to that of the early-fifteenth-century image formerly attributed to Uccello.

H�bner’s friends were students of a prominent Berlin academician, Wilhelm von Schadow, son of Germany’s best-known Neo-Classical sculptor. As if invisible to one another, they are united by H�bner’s all-encompassing portrayal. These friends are shown with a precision suitable to the year of their depiction: 1839, when Daguerre presented his invention to the French Academy, eliciting the famous response that henceforth painting is dead.