In 1832 he was elected to the Dresden professorship of sculpture, and had many foreign orders of merit conferred on him by the governments of different countries.

Rietschel's style was very varied; he produced works imbued with much religious feeling, and to some extent he occupied the same place as a sculptor that Overbeck did in painting.

He was specially famed for his portrait figures of eminent men, treated with much idealism and dramatic vigour; among the latter class his chief works were colossal statues of Goethe and Schiller for the a monument in Weimar, of Weber for Dresden and of Lessing for Braunschweig cast by Georg Howaldt.

[1] The principal among Rietschel's religious pieces of sculpture are the well-known Christ-Angel, and a life-sized Piet, executed for the king of Prussia.

He also worked a great deal in rilievo, and produced many graceful pieces, especially a fine series of bas-reliefs representing "Night and Morning" and "Noon and Twilight".