Albert Christoph Dies

Albert Christoph Dies (1755 – 28 December 1822) was a German painter, engraver, and biographer most noted for his biography of Joseph Haydn, although it is now considered sentimental and not entirely accurate.

[3] Copying pictures, chiefly by Salvator Rosa, for a livelihood, his taste led him to draw and paint from nature in Tivoli, Albano and other picturesque places in the vicinity of Rome.

Meanwhile, he had made the acquaintance of the engraver Giovanni Volpato, for whom he executed numerous drawings, and this no doubt suggested the plan, which he afterwards carried out, of publishing, in partnership with Jacob Wilhelm Mechau, Johann Christian Reinhart and Johann Friedrich Frauenholz,[5] the series of plates known as the Collection de vues pittoresques de l'Italie, published in seventy-two sheets at Nuremberg in 1799.

[2] He also taught landscape painting at the Imperial and Royal Academy, and later, in his final post, was gallery director to Prince Nikolaus Esterházy II.

[citation needed] Compared with another biography written at the same time by Georg August Griesinger, Dies's work is almost certainly less accurate and is more likely to have been sentimentalized and embellished, which he himself alludes to in the introduction of his book: In order not to leave out of the picture the most interesting phase of Haydn's life, I meanwhile made unhesitating use of several articles from the Leipzig Musikalische Zeitung, without entirely suppressing my own untutored opinions.

Dies's Biographische Nachrichten is the work of a sentimental artist who fancied himself a "universal man" but whose approach to the problem of biography was that of his time and place.

The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition gives harsh opinions of Dies's work as an artist:[2] Gotwals writes, "Friedrich Noack in his article in the Thieme and Becker Allgemeines Lexicon der bildenden Künstler ["General lexicon of graphic artists"], describes Dies's work as clumsy, mediocre, and prosaic.