Georg Friedrich Bischoff, German 1819 -1873

Georg Friedrich Bischoff was the eldest of five children born to Johann Michael Bischoff, a locksmith by trade, in Ansbach, Germany.  Even as a youth he displayed a talent for drawing, using every opportunity he could find to depict faces, horses, figures, or whatever captured his attention.  He even gave private lessons to younger students.

In 1835 Bischoff’s parents, deciding upon an artistic education for him, sent him to the “Mecca of the Artist Academy” in Munich.  He studied there until 1842 when he enrolled in the “Matrikel.”  Similar to a graduate school, the academy instructors there included Professor’s J. Schlotthauer, P. Foltz and J. Schnorr von Carolsfeld – all very successful genre artists.  Because money was scarce, Bischoff was unable to continue his studies by traveling so he settled permanently in Munich in 1844. 

A promising artist, he was considered a friendly, happy, loving person who loved nature and was somewhat of a romantic.  Much of his work expressed a sympathetic view toward the life of the peasants and he specialized as an artist of children in rustic landscapes.  Artistic recognition did not come however, until the Munich Art Exhibition of 1854 when one of his pictures was purchased by King Ludwig I.

That same year Bischoff was terribly weakened by cholera and his health declined considerably.  Near the end of his life he became so poor and sickly that it was only with the help of his brother Nickolaus that he entered a sanatorium in Erlangen where he died.

Biography excerpted from the unpublished catalog by Edward P. Bentley for the Haussner Restaurant in Baltimore, Maryland, titled: Haussner’s, The Children.