Johann Wilhelm Preyer

Johann Wilhelm Preyer biography

Johann Wilhelm Preyer, born in Rheydt in Westphalia in 1803, studied painting at the nearby Düsseldorf Academy. He decided to paint still lifes already as a young artist and remained faithful to the genre throughout his life. Preyer thus became the most important German still-life painter in the 19th century. With few exceptions, his entire oeuvre consists almost exclusively of still lifes. Among them are mainly fruits – plums, mirabelles, peaches, bunches of grapes together with some leaves, occasionally some nuts and more rarely a wine goblet – which he arranges on a stone slab. 

Preyer’s pictures are carefully planned ensembles of impressive objectivity and calm. He achieves this through the precisely observed appearance of the items depicted and a superb painting technique. Preyer denies himself any personal emotion or ductus. His unmistakable style is the result of this objectivity. Thus his arrangements are seldom in defined pictorial spaces and almost always lack a specific light source and are therefore illuminated, as it were, from within by a neutral, uniform light. 

Wilhelm Preyer moved to Munich in 1837 with Johann Peter Hasenclever for further training. There, in 1840, King Ludwig I acquired the famous painting “Bockbier-Glas” for the Schleißheim Gallery. He returned to Düsseldorf in autumn 1843.