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The painter Ernst Willers was a student of Ernst Pose and a friend of Schirmer in Düsseldorf. In 1824 he continued his education in Dresden with Johan Christian Dahl. Through Dahl he came into contact with early realist landscape painting and the artistic practice of making oil studies directly from the motif.
In 1843, Willers travelled to Greece on behalf of his sovereign, the Grand Duke Paul Friedrich August von Oldenburg, whose daughter Amalie was the wife of King Otto of Greece since 1836. The commission to create a series of Greek landscapes for Oldenburg Palace prompted him to make a second trip to Greece, which he undertook from 1857 to 1859, accompanied by Louis Gurlitt.
Willers' work consists exclusively of landscapes in which he combined the observation of reality, which was influenced by the emerging movement of realism, with the classical-ideal tradition of southern landscape painting. His works rarely appear on the art market, but they can be found frequently in museum collections - for example a "View of Athens" housed in the Schack-Galerie in Munich.