When Schreiber moved to Nuremberg in the 1840s he was already a well-travelled and respected man. He studied under Johann Gottfried Schadow at the Academy of Arts in Berlin, attended Carl Blechen's landscape class and was also taught by his successor August Wilhelm Schirmer. After a long excursion with Ferdinand Bellermann, who saw him as a very talented pupil of Schirmer, and a period in Munich, where he trained himself on the works of Carl Rottmann, Schreiber was in Rome from at least autumn 1839 - 1841, where he got to know the southern light.