Works by Karl Friedrich Schinkel

Karl Friedrich Schinkel's best-known buildings stand in and around Berlin, but before the big commissions came he lived as a painter, drawing Gothic churches that existed only on paper.

Returning to Berlin from Italy in 1805, Schinkel earned his living with the brush. With French troops holding Berlin after 1806 there was little to build, so he drew imagined Gothic churches, which sold to buyers longing for a simpler past. In Gothic Cathedral Behind a Pond with Swans, from 1810–15, pale spires rise beyond a dark arch hung with leaves. He took up lithography early: for the Interior of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, about 1810, he blackened the stone with ink and scratched the vaults and pillars out of it in white lines. Gate in the Rocks, painted in 1818, looks out of a cave over a misty valley, with a bell hung in the rock and travellers tiny on the path.

After Napoleon's defeat he ran the Prussian Building Commission and built the Neue Wache, the Schauspielhaus and the Altes Museum in Berlin, choosing Greek models over the Roman style tied to the French. For the stage, in 1816, he gave the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute a backdrop full of stars. His 1827 watercolour of The Nave, Apse, and Crossing of a Cathedral for Berlin shows a long hall of fluted Corinthian columns under a coffered ceiling picked out in gold, and a painted apse beyond. Drawings and paintings outnumber his prints, and many date from the 1810s: city views and landscapes, often with mountains, and a few stage designs.

Sources: Wikipedia, Alte Nationalgalerie, Minneapolis Institute of Art, National Gallery of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art. Portrait: Carl Joseph Begas.