Paul Meyerheim

As the son of a painter, Paul Friedrich Meyerheim was educated in artistic techniques from an early age. His father Edward Meyerheim was his first teacher, and he went on to study at the Berlin Academy from 1857 to 1860. Unfortunately, despite the fact that he was a popular and well-known animalier artist in his own time, relatively little is known about his personal life today.

In his own work, Meyerheim was influenced by the French "Barbizon school" painters, and preferred to create landscape and wildlife images. Like many artists of his time, he sketched "from nature" at a relatively local level, visiting zoos and natural history museums to study the animal form. Meyerheim traveled extensively across Europe, teaching painting classes for a brief period in France. He returned to the Berlin Academy in 1887 to accept a professorial role wherein he would instruct the next generation of significant German animalier artists, including: Carl Rungius, Wilhelm Friese, and William Kuhnert.