Johann Anton Alban Ramboux

1790 – 1866

German painter and lithographer. He studied with a former Benedictine monk Abraham (Jean Henri Gilson) in Florenville, Luxembourg from 1803 to 1807. In 1807-12 he was in Paris as a pupil of Jacques-Louis David, whose portraiture influenced him decisively. In 1813 he returned to his native town Trier. In 1815 he was at the Academy in Munich where he was the student of the sculptors Franz and Konrad Eberhard. In early 1816 Ramboux went to Rome, where he worked until June 1822. There he joined the Nazarenes and became friend to Peter Cornelius, Carl Philipp Fohr, Joseph Anton Koch and Johann Friedrich Overbeck. In the summer of 1822 he returned to Trier settled there for ten years. In these years, he made many watercolours with views of the city and the Moselle. Sixteen of these watercolours formed the template for lithographs which he produced and published in 1825. In the spring of 1832 he went again to Italy, where he stayed until September 1842. In Italy, he produced landscapes and genre scenes, but his main activity was to copy frescoes and mosaics from the 13th-16th centuries. Returning to Germany he became curator of the Wallraf collection in Cologne. In 1854 he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem where he created many watercolours for later lithographs. In 1858 he became the first honorary citizen of his native town.

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