Paul Weber (1823-1916)

Gottlieb Daniel Paul Weber was born in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1823, and in the early 1840s began his art studies locally with landscape and genre painter August Lucas (1803-1863) and in Frankfurt with Jakob Becker (1810-1872). He continued his education at the Munich Academy from 1844-1848 and studied with genre painter Josephus Laurentius Dyckmans (1811-1888) before emigrating to the United States and settling in Philadelphia in 1848. There Weber conducted painting classes, counting among his students William Trost Richards, Edward Moran and William Stanley Haseltine, and began exhibiting with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His bucolic landscapes were inspired by the scenery he encountered during extensive travels throughout the Northeast, including sites outside Philadelphia, up the Hudson River, the Catskill Mountains and Niagara Falls. 

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Weber returned to Europe several times throughout his life, touring Scotland, France, Germany and Switzerland from 1857-1858, and in 1861 returned to Darmstadt as court painter to the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt.  He did not stay in Germany long, but returned to Philadelphia where he lived until his death in 1916. In addition to the Pennsylvania Academy, where he won a silver medal in 1858, Weber exhibited at the Boston Athenaeum, the National Academy, the Brooklyn Art Association, the Washington Art Association and the Paris Salon, and today examples of his work can be found at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz, New York, the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, and the Westmoreland Museum of Art in Greenburg, Pennsylvania.

References: See Who Was Who in American Art (1999); John Paul Driscoll, All That is Glorious Around Us (Museum of Art , Pennsylvania State University, Jan-Mar 1981); Philadelphia Artists: The Weber Family, exhibition catalogue, Frank S. Schwarz & Son, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Collection XXIX - Summer 1985.