After a voyage to Rome around 1805, where they met several German artists and experienced classical antiquity, the couple moved to Stuttgart.

There, Duttenhofer was in contact with the educated bourgeoisie and also met famous authors like Jean Paul and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

[1] After the 1779 death of her father, she and her mother moved in with her maternal grandparents in Stuttgart, Jakob Friedrich Spittler and his wife Johanna Christine (née Bilfinger).

[4] Her great-uncle, prelate Heinrich Christoph Bilfinger, paid for drawing lessons for Luise, whose talent was visible at an early age, but did not allow her to take up painting.

[5][6] She later regretted not having a more thorough artistic education and would have liked to become a painter, but middle class expectations were that art was a leisure time activity, not a profession.

[15] Her local friends included the poet Karl Mayer, the Morgenblatt editor Friedrich Haug and the art historian Ludwig von Schorn.

[22] Duttenhofer had six further children in Stuttgart, with three of them reaching adulthood: Marie Luise (1807–1839), Friedrich Martin (1810–1859) and Anton Raphael (1812–1843).

[24] From November 1828, Duttenhofer, her husband and two of the children spent a few months in Munich, where she made drawings from works in various galleries and collections.

[33] The only publication including her work during her lifetime was an 1821 collection of poems by Christian Gottlob Vischer, illustrated by Duttenhofer and her husband.

[36] Duttenhofer was the most important silhouettist of her age in Germany,[37][38] but her work was mostly forgotten after her death and only re-discovered in the early 20th century by the art historian Gustav Edmund Pazaurek [de] and exhibited in Düsseldorf in 1909.

[39] Her descendants gave most of her oeuvre to the Schiller-Nationalmuseum [de; sk]:[11] 337 folio pages containing at least one papercut each were donated to the same museum by Otto Tafel in 1911 and 1933.