As a young man, he heeded the advice of his fellow countryman, the landscapist Ernst Willers,[1] and went to Vienna in late 1855 in order to enroll at the private art school for the monumental paintings founded four years earlier by Carl Rahl.

His "antiquated views" led to repeated protests on the part of his students and later even to withdrawals, leading among other things to the founding of the New Art Group.

There he made the ceiling fresco Poseidon's Wedding Procession, Demons of the Storm, and Protective Ghosts of the Sea, which are of noble form and very graceful, but have some insufficiencies concerning the clothing and the illumination.

Griepenkerl also made the decorative oil paintings (finished in 1878) in the stairway hall of the Augusteum in Oldenburg, on the ceiling depicting the Venus Urania as the ideal of all beauty, surrounded by four themes from the myth of Prometheus; and on three walls (similar to the hémicycle of Paul Delaroche) is depicted an ideal gathering of the all-time heroes of art in historical sequence.

It was followed by a cycle of paintings – once again employing themes from the Prometheus myth – that are distinguished by a great concept of forms and a swinging composition, in the conference hall of the new Academy of Sciences in Athens.