Wilhelm Trübner

1851 – 1917

German painter, son of a jeweler and goldsmith. He began studying painting at the Kuntschule in Karlsruhe in 1867. Two years later he moved to Munich, where he visited the Akademie der Bildenden Künste. After studying for a brief spell in Stuttgart, he returned to Munich, where in 1871 he made the acquaintance of Wilhelm Leibl, a Naturalist painter who had met Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet , among others, during his stay in Paris. Encouraged by Leibl, he dropped out of the academy and went to paint in the Lake Starnberg area. Here he had the chance to become acquainted with the new painting trends of his French contemporaries. The years he belonged to the Leibl-Kreis (Leibl Circle) are regarded as the artistic peak in Trübner's career. During the following years Trübner lived in Munich, made numerous trips to other European capitals and spent a period in London, from 1884 to 1885. His painting came close to Impressionism and at the beginning of the 1890s he met Lovis Corinth and Max Liebermann. In 1896 he was appointed director of the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt and shortly afterwards founded a private art school. He became director of the Kunstschule of Karlsruhe in 1904. He died in the city in 1917, before he could take up his new post as professor of the Berlin Akademie der Künste.

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