Joachim Martin Falbe

1709–1782, Berlin

Joachim Martin Falbe was trained by Johann Harper and Antoine Pesne, whose close collaborator he was for fifteen years. Falbe was a talented society portrait painter in Berlin during the era of Frederick the Great and his work was much in demand. In 1764 he became a member of the Berlin Academy. Falbe’s printed oeuvre is small and rare. All of his prints were made during a period of only two years between 1750 and 1752, suggesting that printmaking was merely a sideline. Stylistically, Falbe is indebted to his contemporaries like Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich (1712–1774) and the French printmakers of the Rococo period.