August Ahlborn

In 1825 the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the man who gave Berlin its neoclassical face, painted an imaginary panorama called A View of Greece in its Prime, a bright vision of the ancient world being built. That original was later destroyed. What survives, and what hangs today in Berlin's Alte Nationalgalerie, is the copy August Ahlborn made of it in 1836.

Ahlborn was a Hanover tailor's son who studied at the Berlin Academy under Karl Wilhelm Wach and won a prize in 1826 that paid for the journey every northern landscape painter dreamed of, south to Italy. He reached Rome in 1827, helped found the German artists' club there, and painted the Italian, Tyrolean and north-German scenery that filled the Prussian royal collection.

Italy held him for the rest of his life. He died in Rome in 1857, far from Hanover, having spent his last decades among the light he had gone there to paint.