Eugen Eduard Schäffer , also Scheffer, was a German draftsman and lithographer. From 1833 to the 1850s he was a teacher of engraving at the Städel Art Institute.
Schäffer, son of an innkeeper of a food stall at Frankfurt Cathedral who died early, attended a private drawing school from June 1818 at the Städel Art Institute under the engraver Johann Conrad Ulmer, from May 1821 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and from 1824 to 1826 Düsseldorf Art Academy under Peter Cornelius, whose picture Dante's Paradise he engraved there in 1825.
In 1826 he went back to Munich with Cornelius. In 1828 he created a portrait of the bookseller Friedrich Campe (1777–1846) in Nuremberg and the Dürer statue after Konrad Eberhard for the Dürer Festival . In 1831 he made the contour engraving The Seven Joys of Mary after Hans Memling in three sheets.
After he returned to his hometown in 1832, he became a teacher of engraving at the Städel Art Institute in 183 . In 1844 he traveled to Italy and stayed particularly in Florence, where he drew the Madonna della Sedia after Raphael. He converted the drawing into an engraving in Frankfurt am Main in 1845, the plate of which was completed in 1849. It appeared in print in 1851. In 1848 he was promoted to professor at the Städel Art Institute.
In August 1852, Schäffer went back to Italy, where he visited Venice, Bologna, Naples, Florence and other places, stayed in Rome from September 1852 to May 1853 and took part in the “Cervaro Festival” of the German Artists' Association in 1853. He then lived in Munich. Because he had illegally exceeded the vacation granted to him, he was dismissed from the teaching staff at the Städel Art Institute.
In October 1856 he was back in Frankfurt, where he soon completed the Madonna del Granduca after Raphael. For the Arundel Society, founded in London in 1849, he delivered several of Fiesole's Roman frescoes from the lives of Saints Stephen and Lawrence and, after Giotto's frescoes for Padua , The Entombment of Christ and The Raising of Lazarus. In 1857 he joined the Frankfurt Artists' Society.
On November 24, 1870, he suffered a stroke in his studio and died on January 7, 1871 at the age of 68.