Adam Elsheimer was a German artist working in Rome who died at only thirty-two but was very influential in the early 17th century in the field of Baroque paintings.
Background
Elsheimer was born on March 18, 1578, in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany; one of ten children and the son of a master tailor. His father's house (which survived until destroyed by Allied bombs in 1944) was a few meters from the church where Albrecht Dürer's Heller Altarpiece was then displayed.
Education
He was apprenticed to the artist Philipp Uffenbach. He probably visited Strasbourg in 1596.
Career
At the age of twenty, he traveled to Italy via Munich, where he is documented in 1598. In his later years, he preferred night pieces, which convey a lyrical rather than a dramatic mood. The Flight into Egypt (Munich) exploits the pictorial effect of a moonlit landscape with an open wood fire in the foreground.
Philemon and Baucis (Dresden) is an interior worthy of Rembrandt.
A few of his etchings are in existence. Netherlandish, Venetian, and Roman trends are blended in the highly personal style of his mature works. Though he was the only German painter of international stature in the 17th century, his art was mainly rooted in the Netherlands, where it had a profound influence, especially on the work of Rubens, Rembrandt, and Seghers.
Elsheimer converted to Catholicism by 1608 (possibly 1606).
Membership
He was Curator of the Vatican Botanical Garden, and a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, a small intellectual coterie founded in 1603, and mainly concerned with the natural sciences.
Connections
In 1606, Elsheimer married Carola Antonia Stuarda da Francoforte (i. e. Stuart of Frankfurt- she was of Scottish ancestry and a fellow Frankfurter), and in 1609 they had a son.
The son was not mentioned in a census a year later, possibly (Klessman says optimistically) because he had been put out to a wet-nurse.
She was the recent widow of the artist Nicolas de Breul (born in Verdun) and after Elsheimer's death remarried an Italian artist, Ascanio Quercia, within a year of his death.