Adolf Dressler
German, 1833-1881
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Adolf Dressler was a German painter. He is considered the founder of Silesian landscape painting.
Adolf Dressler was a son of Joseph Wilhelm Dressler and his wife Auguste, b. Rich. From 1849 to 1853 he received his first art lessons from the Breslau artists Johann Heinrich Christoph König and Ernst Resch. In 1855 he showed two pictures at the exhibition of the Silesian Art Association, which the association bought. With this money, Dressler was able to continue his studies with Jakob Becker in Frankfurt am Main. Here he made friends with his fellow student Anton Burger, with whom he went to Kronberg im Taunus in 1858 to the Kronberg painter's colony.
Dressler returned to Breslau in 1864 and shortly afterwards married Luise Engelmann from Rohrlach (today: Trzcińsko ) near Hirschberg. Her son Hans Dressler also became a painter.
Dressler mainly painted landscapes, which he exhibited in Breslau, Dresden and Berlin. In 1870 he was commissioned by the industrialist von Schaffgotsch to make four wall paintings for Koppitz Castle (destroyed by arson in 1958). Kaiser Wilhelm I had two pictures of Dressler bought for his collections.
In 1879 he was appointed head of the landscape painting studio in Breslau at the newly founded Museum of Fine Arts. Commissioned by the city of Wroclaw, he created a 7 × 20 m panoramic picture of the Giant Mountains, which was completed in 1881. It later came into the possession of a Hamburg entrepreneur who moved it to the Prinz-Heinrich-Baude, where it burned down with the building at the end of the Second World War.
Adolf Dressler is considered to be the founder of Silesian landscape painting .
Dressler was buried in the Maria Magdalena cemetery in Breslau (destroyed after 1945). His works can be found in the Wroclaw National Museum and in the Giant Mountains Museum ( Muzeum Karkonoskie ) in Hirschberg.