Collection: Art prints by Wilhelm Kuhnert

Wilhelm Kuhnert was a German painter and is considered one of the most important animal and Africa painters in German art history in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - an artist whose work combined the academic tradition of animal painting with an authenticity fed by direct field observation that fundamentally distinguished him from most of his contemporaries and lent his work a credibility and liveliness that is still convincing today. He was born in Opole in Silesia in 1865 and received his artistic training at the Berlin Academy of Arts, where he learned the basics of animal painting. However, the decisive step in his artistic development was not the Berlin studios, but three extensive trips to East Africa, which he undertook between 1891 and 1912 and on which he studied the wildlife of the East African savannah at close quarters and recorded it in thousands of sketches and studies.

On these trips, Kuhnert developed a way of working that was almost unique among German animal painters of his time. He did not paint lions, elephants, buffaloes, zebras and giraffes from specimens in zoological gardens or from other people's models, but from his own observations in the wild, under the harsh East African light and in the midst of the vastness of the landscape that lends his depictions an authenticity and atmospheric density that studio works never achieve. This immediacy of observation was the real foundation of his fame and made him the German Africa painter of his generation par excellence.

A central feature of his mature work is the combination of zoological precision and painterly atmosphere. His depictions of lions and his large savannah paintings in particular are among the most impressive achievements of German animal painting and show him at his best: as a painter who did not isolate the animal but understood it in inseparable connection with its surroundings and who combined light, landscape and animal to create a convincing, coherent pictorial unit. In addition to his work as a painter, Kuhnert illustrated numerous natural history publications and books, which made his Africa pictures accessible to a wide audience.

Wilhelm Kuhnert died in Flims, Switzerland, in 1926 and left behind an extensive body of work. Today he is regarded as the most important German Africa painter of his generation, whose depictions of animals are still highly valued in German museums and on the international art market due to their atmospheric density and authenticity based on direct observation of nature.