His parents could not afford to pay for any further education, so they apprenticed him to a banker and he was engaged in that profession until 1822, when an increasing interest in art led him to the Berlin Academy.

[1] After a short study trip to Dresden and Saxon Switzerland, he returned to Berlin and obtained a position as a decorator for the Royal Theater on the Alexanderplatz.

Despite this appointment, King Frederick William III commissioned Blechen to paint The Interior of the Palm House on the Pfaueninsel Near Potsdam, an indoor scene rather than an outdoor landscape.

[6] In 2008, the Blechen "Scene of a forest with a castle, on the water front " was identified in a Sotheby's auction catalogue by the family of Alfred Sommerguth, a German Jewish art collector persecuted by the Nazis.

In 2012 the Blechen, “Hoehenzug mit blauen Schatten” (Mountain Range With Blue Shadows), was restituted to the heirs of Martha Liebermann, who took poison at the age of 85 to escape deportation to a Nazi concentration camp.

[8] Seized by the Nazis and intended for Adolf Hitler's planned “Fuehrermuseum, they were handed to the German government by the Allies after World War II on the understanding that they would be returned to the original owner.

[9] In 2014 the Staatliche Kunstsammlung Karlsruhe discovered the Nazi-era history of Blechen’s Santa Scholastica and restituted the artwork to the heirs of the Jewish publisher and art collector Rudolf Mosse.