REHBERG, Friedrich
German painter, lithographer, engraver. He studied under Adam Friedrich Oeser (1717-1799) in Leipzig, Giovanni Battista Casanova (1730-1795) and Johann Eleazar Schenau (1737-1806) in Dresden and Raphael Mengs in Rome, for whom he returned to Rome to work in 1777. In 1783, he returned to Hannover, where he painted portraits for a year.
From 1783 to 1787, he taught drawing in Dessau. He became a member of the academy of art in Berlin in 1787, going on to become professor there the following year. In 1791, he went to Naples, where he worked for Lady Hamilton. In 1813, he went to London, where, in 1815, he exhibited his mythological subjects at the Royal Academy. In 1814, he made another trip to Rome, before finally settling in Munich, where, in 1824, he published Raffaël Sanzio von Urbino and some basic principles of lithographical drawings.
As a former pupil of Oeser and Mengs, he was part of the Post-Classical School and often sank into mawkish sentimentally. He continued to be of merit only as a portrait artist.
Rehberg’s oeuvre remained faithful to the formalist precepts of pictorial Classicism, which, coupled with his controversial temperament and his strict opposition to new artistic trends, determined the fate of his career: both he and his work soon fell into oblivion.
