Johann Wilhelm Walkhoff

1789 Gröbzig in Anhalt-Dessau – 1822 Naples

Johann Wilhelm Walkhoff, a landscape painter who died young, was taught by Carl Wilhelm Kolbe in Dessau. He began studying theology around 1810. Financial support from the family of the counts of Posern enabled him to travel to Rome in 1815 to study landscape painting. Shortly afterwards the artist made the acquaintance in Albano of Johann Christian Reinhart, who was to exert a considerable influence on his work. In 1817/18 and 1820 Walkhoff was in Sicily. At the exhibition in Palazzo Caffarelli in Rome in 1819 the artist had four landscapes on display which Nagler described as “aptly chosen and diligently executed”. A few years later, in 1822, Walkhoff committed suicide. His etchings are very rare.