VOGEL VON VOGELSTEIN, Carl Christian

German painter. The son of the child and portrait painter Christian Leberecht Vogel, he was trained early in life by his father. From 1804 he visited the Kunstakademie in Dresden, where he copied many paintings in the Gemäldegalerie and also produced the first of his own portraits.

In 1807 he replied to an invitation from Baron von Löwenstern, whose children he had taught in Dresden, to come to Dorpat in Livland. In 1808 he moved to Saint Petersburg, where he set up a studio in the princely and successfully worked producing portraits of nobles and diplomats. In Russia he amassed a collection of his own sketches of celebrated men: a collection of some 700 portrait sketches in the Kupferstich Kabinett in Dresden are testimony to his fine skills. These drawings were in the form of medallion portraits, the earlier ones in chalk, the later ones in fine pencil.

In 1812 Vogel was finally rich enough to make a long-desired grand tour to Italy, stopping off at Berlin and Dresden on the way, where he painted his parents and Franz Pettrich. From 1813 to 1820 he lived in Rome, where many German artists were active at that time. He tried to run a middle course between the classicising and romanticising schools then prevailing there, with a style of his own closely drawing on that of Raphael Mengs. In Italy he copied a large number of paintings and wall paintings by the old masters. On later journeys he further augmented his collection of copies and in 1860 published a catalogue of them.

Besides religious paintings, landscapes and anatomical studies, Vogel also produced portraits in Rome, of subjects such as Lucien Bonaparte, Pope Pius VII, as well as fellow artists Thorvaldsen, Canova, Cornelius, Overbeck, Vent, Schnorr von Carolsfeld and Friedrich,

Following an appointment in 1820 as Professor at the Fine Arts Academy in Dresden, Vogel von Vogelstein was appointed painter to the court in 1824 and elevated to nobility in 1831, earning the title of ‘Von Vogelstein’.