VOGEL, Christian Leberecht - b. 1759 Dresden, d. 1816 Dresden

German painter, draughtsman and art theoretician, part of a family of painters, father of Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein. He studied with Johann Eleazar Schenau (1737-1806) in Dresden and at the Dresden Akademie.

From 1780 he worked for the Saxon nobility in the Muldenland, including (until 1804) Friedrich Magnus, Graf von Solms, at Schloss Wildenfels, near Zwickau. He not only painted portraits of his employers, but also taught their children drawing. His portraits of children were especially popular, e.g. the Master’s Sons (1793; Coburg, Schloss). He exhibited in Dresden and in 1800 became a member of the Dresden Akademie, where he was appointed professor in 1814.

Because his works have been largely in private ownership, his extensive oeuvre is not completely known. His portraits, transitional between Enlightenment Rococo and classicist Romanticism, have a somewhat sentimental, genre quality. Their emotive transfiguration of childhood is thoroughly bourgeois and anticipates the intimacy of Biedermeier art. The technical quality of his work is exceptionally high, being based on the traditions of the Dresden school.