Eduard Schleich the Elder

Eduard Schleich left 647 sketchbooks and more than 8,000 drawings, most of them made on foot across Upper Bavaria, among the moors, river meadows and lakes around Munich.

As a boy, it is said, he was turned away by the Munich academy for lack of talent. He learned instead from the landscape painters of the day, Carl Rottmann among them, and from the Dutch masters of the 17th century in the Munich collections. What held him was the light of one particular moment and the mood it gave a place, more than the fixed colour of things.

In time the city's art institutions honoured him. From 1850 to 1872 he sat on the board of the Munich Kunstverein, the city's art society, and as its president he organised Munich's first international art exhibition in 1869. A year earlier the academy had made him an honorary member. He died in January 1874, during a cholera epidemic in Munich. Franz von Lenbach painted his portrait twice, and the earlier one, from the early 1860s, hangs in the Lenbachhaus today.