Fritz von Uhde

Fritz von Uhde (1848–1911) was a German painter born into a middle-class family in Wolkenburg, Saxony. At the age of 18 he began to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden, but after a year left and joined the army, becoming an instructor in horsemanship. He left the army in 1877 and moved to Munich to study at Academy of Fine Arts, and thence in 1879 to Paris. Ironically, although in Paris during the flowering of Impressionism, here his enthusiasm was for the chiaroscuro of classical Dutch painting; and it was only when travelling in Holland in 1882 that he began to experiment with Impressionism. In the 1890s he was back at the Academy in Munich as a professor. He was one of the founders of the Munich Secession and was later part of the Berlin Secession.