Adolf Seel 

Biography of Adolf Seel  ( 1829-1907 )

Adolf Seel was a german watercolor and painter artist, who began his aprenticeship at the Düsserdorf’s Fine Art School at the age of fifteen. He also had Rudolf Wiegman’s architecture lessons and studies vedute painting.

From 1847 to 1850, he studied history painting with Karl Ferdinand Sohn, and went to Paris in 1852. During ten years, he improved his style and has becomen gradually a famous architecture painter.

As a traveller painter, Adolf Seel went to Spania, Portugal, Italy, but also Orient and especially Cairo and Palestine. Fascinated by moorish architecture, he always used the Alhambras’s wonderful decoration in his paintings.

The artworks realized during his travels are absolutely remarkable by their precision and the quite perfect execution of the architecture. During his journeys, the artist was inspired by the cities architecture, so well that arab and moorish houses became his principal subject when he painted. These architecture’s pieces are presented like beautiful landscapes, very well executed. Becomen one of the most important architecture painter of his time, Seel was awarded with many orders and distinctions.

During the 1876’s Vienne Exhibition, he won the archduke Karl Ludwig’s medal for his painting « Arabian yard in Cairo », also exhibited at the National Gallery of Berlin and at the 1878’s Universal Exhibition too. The same year, he is decorated with the Berliner Akademischen Kunstausstellung’s gold medal.

Renowed as an orientalist painter, Adolf Seel regularly exhibited his artworks in the most famous german exhibitions and in Vienna too. All along his life, he came across success, due to his watercolors and oil paintings, and became in his lifetime the best representative painter of architecture painting.