Albert Emil Kirchner was a German painter.
Kirchner was the son of a master carpenter. He first attended the Sankt Thomas Latin School in Leipzig and, at the age of 13, the building school run by Albert Geutebrück (1801–1868). Two years later he was a student of Friedrich Brauers at the Leipzig Academy. He then attended the art academy in Dresden, where the future architecture and landscape painter became a student of Johan Christian Clausen Dahl and Caspar David Friedrich.

After a long stay in Munich, he returned to Saxony in 1832 to make drawings for Ludwig Puttrich's (1783–1856) collective work “Monuments to Medieval Architecture”. In 1834 he moved permanently to Munich with his wife, whom he married in 1836. There, in addition to drawings, he also devoted himself to painting. He became a member of the Munich Academy and the state honored him by awarding him a large pension.