Friedrich Gunkel (1819 - 1876)

Friedrich Gunkel

Friedrich Gunkel was a German painter. Gunkel studied at the Academy in Kassel. Here he was a student of Ludwig Emil Grimm and Friedrich Wilhelm Müller and was soon considered the best student in the drawing class. He went to Berlin and worked in the studio of Peter von Cornelius as his assistant. From May 9, 1847, he lived in Rome as a German Roman and became a member of the German Association of Artists. In 1856 he formed a community with the sculptors Gustav Kaupert and Heinrich Gerhardt and the painter Heinrich Dreber. Gunkel's most famous work was the Hermannsschlacht, a monumental history painting that the Bavarian King Maximilian II had commissioned in 1857 for the Maximilianeum and that Gunkel completed in Munich between 1862 and 1864. Destroyed in World War II, it survives only in photographs and reproductions.