He was born to a family of German ancestry, that had moved to Rome from Sudetenland at the beginning of the 18th century.

After attending a Catholic school, he began his artistic studies at the age of eighteen at the Accademia di San Luca.

In 1875, he and Nazzareno Cipriani developed a proposal that would become the Associazione degli Acquarellisti romani [it] (Association of Watercolorists).

His clients over the following decades included Empress Maria Feodorovna, Kings Victor Emmanuel II and Umberto I, and Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse.

[1] He died at his home on the Piazza San Claudio, aged sixty-two, and was interred at the Campo Verano.