He learned drawing skills, etching on copper and steel, how to use a chisel, marquetry and wood carving from his father, who was a Gunsmith.

For several years he worked intensively in order to be able to finance his higher education, but this appears to have exhausted him, and two months after enrolling at the Technical University of Munich he succumbed to typhoid.

[2] He returned to his home town to convalesce and then enrolled at the nearby Karlsruhe Technical Academy to study machine construction, chemistry and architecture.

[2] After half a year he decided for a more artistic focus, studying at the city's Kunstgewerbeschule, a predecessor of the Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe, where he was taught by Adolf Des Coudres and Johann Wilhelm Schirmer.

Another of his teachers was the sculptor Hans Baur (1829-1897), who had rented a studio of his own in the academy's new building in the Bismarck Street ("Bismarckstraße") where he taught both Moest and Gustav von Kreß.

It was also around this time that he produced his first larger work, the group composition "Minerva with Trade and Industry", on top of the main railway bridge across the Rhine in Mannheim (later destroyed in the Second World War).

[4] He was also employed by Dyckerhoff & Widman, a building supplies company which specialised in architectural embellishments and molded cement sculptures (among other things).