Background
Olivier was born in Dessau on 1 April 1785, to a family of Swiss-French descent.
Olivier was born in Dessau on 1 April 1785, to a family of Swiss-French descent.
He began his artistic education in 1801 by taking drawing lessons from Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, and also studied with the woodblock printers Christian Haldenweg and Johann Friedrich Unger. There he studied with Jakob Wilhelm Mechau and Karl Ludwig Kaaz, copied old masters in the Gemäldegalerie, and got to know the artists Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge.
Between 1807 and 1810 he was employed on a diplomatic mission to Paris in the service of Prince Leopold Friedrich Franz von Anhalt-Dessau. While there he often visited the Musée Napoléon, particularly admiring the works of Northern Renaissance artists such as January van Eyck and Hans Memling, who had a profound effect on his style. In 1810 he returned to Dessau.
There he got to know, and came under the influence of, the landscape painter Joseph Koch.
Olivier visited Salzburg in 1815 and 1817, making drawings which, in 1822, he used as the basis of a series of lithographs in the which Austrian landscapes form the background to Christian iconography. In 1830 he moved to Munich, where, three years later, he was appointed secretary of the academy and professor of art history.
He died at Munich on 11 February 1841. His two younger brothers Friedrich and Heinrich also became artists.
Olivier was the only member of the group never to have visited Italy.