Eduard von Grützner

Eduard Theodor Ritter von Grützner (May 26, 1846 – April 2, 1925) was a German painter and professor of art.

Grützner was born in 1846 into a noble family in Groß-Karlowitz near Neisse, Upper Silesia, Prussia (now Poland).

The manager of a ducal country house in the neighborhood got him drawing paper, and eventually the pastor gained him entrance to the Gymnasium (a university preparatory school) of Neisse.

In 1864, the pastor brought Grützner to the private school of Hermann Dyck in Munich for art education, at first in the vocational Kunstgewerbeschule under Dyck, soon transferring to the Classical Art class of Johann Georg Hiltensperger and Alexander Ströhuber, where the students learned about the aesthetic ideals of antiquity.

In 1888, he became engaged to Anna Grützner Wirthmann, the daughter of a Munich garrison commander, and a short time later their son Karl Eduard was born.

In his old age he sought solace in Chinese philosophy, and began to collect items from the far east and learn Japanese.

Grützner was, along with Carl Spitzweg and Franz von Defregger, one of Munich's leading genre painters in the second half of the 19th century.