Ferdinand Olivier

He began his artistic education in 1801 by taking drawing lessons from Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, and also studied with the woodblock printers Christian Haldenwang and Johann Friedrich Unger.

[2] There he studied with Jacob Wilhelm Mechau and Karl Ludwig Kaaz,[1] copied old masters in the Gemäldegalerie, and got to know the artists Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge.

[2] While still in Paris he painted, in collaboration with his brother Heinrich, two works for the chapel on the Prince's estate at Wörlitz[3] and began a life-sized portrait of Napoleon on his horse, which he seems only to have finished after leaving the city.

[1] Fritz Novotny contrasts Olivier's paintings of this period – "artificial landscapes with their wings – typical Nazarene work" – with the precise, closely observed drawings he made of the suburbs of Vienna at the same time in which he shows "by means of things small and insignificant in themselves, the might of the invisible forces of nature, the infinity and silence of space".

[2] In 1817 he became a member of the "Lukasband" (usually translated as the "Brotherhood of Saint Luke"), a fraternity of artists, often known as the "Nazarenes", which had been founded by Friedrich Overbeck and Franz Pforr eight years earlier.