Franz Adam

Franz Adam was born into the family business, and the family business was battles. His father Albrecht Adam had ridden with Napoleon's armies as a war painter, and three of his sons carried on painting soldiers and horses. Franz, born in Milan in 1815, became the best known of them.

He learned the craft at his father's side, then made his name with lithographs of the 1848 uprisings in the Italian states, produced with the French war illustrator Raffet. Horses were his real subject as much as armies were. He drew them at the gallop and the halt with a specialist's eye, and he later taught that skill at the Academy in Munich, training a generation of younger battle painters.

His large canvases follow the Bavarian and allied troops through the campaigns of the 19th century, from the wars in Italy to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. He died in Munich in 1886, the city where he had settled and taught, an Italian-born painter of German armies to the end.