Famous German Paintings: 8 Works from Dürer to Franz Marc

by Luciano Drehmer October 15, 2026

by Luciano Drehmer Published on October 15, 2026

Albrecht Dürer was 28 in 1500 when he painted himself facing straight out of a dark panel, posed like an icon of Christ. In 1911 Franz Marc painted a young blue horse with its head lowered, as if lost in thought. Between them come Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, Lucas Cranach's The Fountain of Youth, Tischbein's Goethe and two canvases by Caspar David Friedrich. These eight famous German paintings span four centuries, and each holds its place among famous paintings of every century.

Two neighbors have guides of their own, centered on Madrid and Amsterdam: Spanish painting from Velázquez to Picasso and Dutch painting of the Golden Age.

At a glance

#	Painting	Artist	Year	Where to see it (checked October 2026)
1	Self-Portrait with Fur-Trimmed Robe	Albrecht Dürer	1500	Alte Pinakothek, Munich
2	The Isenheim Altarpiece	Matthias Grünewald	1512–1516	Musée Unterlinden, Colmar
3	The Ambassadors	Hans Holbein the Younger	1533	National Gallery, London
4	The Fountain of Youth	Lucas Cranach the Elder	1546	Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
5	Goethe in the Roman Campagna	Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein	1787	Städel Museum, Frankfurt
6	The Monk by the Sea	Caspar David Friedrich	1808–1810	Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin
7	Wanderer above the Sea of Fog	Caspar David Friedrich	c. 1817	Hamburger Kunsthalle
8	Blue Horse I	Franz Marc	1911	Lenbachhaus, Munich

Renaissance German paintings: Dürer, Grünewald, Holbein and Cranach

01Self-Portrait with Fur-Trimmed Robe, Albrecht Dürer (1500)

Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait with Fur-Trimmed Robe, 1500 — Dürer faces us head-on against a dark ground, his right hand at the fur of his robe.
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Dürer's Self-Portrait with Fur-Trimmed Robe is better known as the self-portrait at twenty-eight, after its Latin inscription. In translation the inscription reads, "I, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg portrayed myself in appropriate colours aged twenty-eight years," and each word in it was chosen with care.

Dürer borrowed the formula from icons of Christ the Saviour, yet every detail belongs to one particular man. The steady gaze and the hand at the fur turn the picture toward seeing and making. The Alte Pinakothek in Munich calls it probably the most unusual self-portrait in the history of art, for its frontality and its careful finish.

The museum bought the panel from Nuremberg in 1805. In October 2026 it hangs in Room I on the Alte Pinakothek's upper floor. It also opens a survey of self-portraits from Dürer to Van Gogh, with Rembrandt along the way.

02The Isenheim Altarpiece, Matthias Grünewald (1512–1516)

Matthias Grünewald, The Isenheim Altarpiece, 1512–1516 — The closed altarpiece: the Crucifixion in the center, Saint Sebastian and Saint Anthony on the wings, the Lamentation below.
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Grünewald was born Mathis Gothart Nithart in Würzburg and died in Halle in 1528. Between 1512 and 1516 he painted the panels of the Isenheim Altarpiece for the Antonite monastery at Isenheim, a village south of Colmar. Niclaus of Haguenau carved its sculpture.

The monks ran a hospital for victims of Saint Anthony's fire. This was poisoning by ergot, a fungus that grows on rye, and it caused gangrene of the hands and feet. On the high altar of the hospital chapel stood the Isenheim Crucifixion, a Christ covered in sores with his fingers twisted in pain. The panel also appears among paintings of Jesus from Giotto to Dalí.

The altarpiece stayed in the chapel until the French Revolution. In 1852 it moved to the old convent chapel of the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, where it still stands in autumn 2026.

03The Ambassadors, Hans Holbein the Younger (1533)

Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533 — Two men in their twenties, one in pink satin and fur, the other in a dark gown, face us across a crowded shelf.
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Holbein was born in Augsburg in the winter of 1497 to 1498. He spent two long periods in England, from 1526 to 1528 and from 1532 until he died of the plague in London in 1543. Holbein's The Ambassadors comes from the second stay, and in October 2026 it hangs in Room 4 of the National Gallery in London.

The panel is just over two meters square, so the two men stand close to life size. On the left is Jean de Dinteville, on his second diplomatic mission to England for Francis I of France. On the right is his close friend Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur.

In 1533 Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn and broke with Rome. The objects on the shelves seem to allude to that discord. The lute has a broken string, one of a set of flutes is missing, and a Lutheran hymn book lies open nearby. An arithmetic book is wedged open at a page on division, and a crucifix hides at the top left, pinned to the green curtain.

The long, smeared shape between the men's feet is a skull, a memento mori. It snaps into focus only when you look up from the bottom right corner. The effect is called anamorphosis, and the National Gallery's entry on the painting walks through each object on the shelves.

Holbein seldom signed his work, but here he signed and dated the marble floor behind Dinteville, with more flourish than usual. That suggests he was proud of the picture. "The most melancholy, weary and wearisome ambassador that was ever seen" is how Dinteville described himself in his surviving letters.

04The Fountain of Youth, Lucas Cranach the Elder (1546)

Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Fountain of Youth, 1546 — A walled pool with a fountain at its center fills a wide landscape crowded with bathers.
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Cranach was court painter to Elector Frederick the Wise. His family workshop produced some 5,000 works over about eighty years, and around 2,000 survive. Cranach's The Fountain of Youth is one of the collection highlights of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.

Read it from left to right. Old women come down from a barren, rocky country in carts, on stretchers and on other people's backs. A doctor gives his patient a last, hopeless look. In the pool their wrinkles smooth out and their skin turns rosy. On the right a gentleman leads them to a tent to be dressed, then on to dancing and a banquet in green meadows.

Only women bathe in the pool, while Venus and Cupid stand on the fountain column. Rabelais, writing in Cranach's lifetime, offers a key. His Pantagruel learns that old women are melted down and recast young, while old men grow young again in the company of young women. Cranach's fountain is a fountain of love, an old legend given an ironic turn for his princely patrons. No other large panel painting of the subject is known.

The 18th century: Tischbein's Goethe

05Goethe in the Roman Campagna, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein (1787)

Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, Goethe in the Roman Campagna, 1787 — Goethe reclines on fallen stones in a pale traveling cloak and a broad hat, with ruins on the plain behind him.
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Goethe set out for Italy in September 1786, traveling incognito because he was already a famous author. In Rome he stayed with his friend Tischbein, and together they made an excursion to the ancient tombs of the Campagna.

Tischbein made that landscape the stage for Goethe in the Roman Campagna, dated 1787. The round tower behind the reclining poet is the tomb of Caecilia Metella. The Städel Museum in Frankfurt, which owns the canvas, says that no other portrait has shaped our image of Goethe as much. It places him between antiquity and his own time.

Look closely at his feet: Goethe appears to have two left feet, an oddity no one has explained.

Romanticism: two by Caspar David Friedrich

Friedrich (1774 to 1840) was born in Greifswald, studied at the academy in Copenhagen and settled in Dresden in 1798. Two of his canvases appear among the world's best-known landscape paintings. A separate guide to Romantic landscapes in Europe and America follows him further, to The Sea of Ice.

06The Monk by the Sea, Caspar David Friedrich (1808–1810)

Caspar David Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea, 1808–1810 — A tiny figure on a dune faces a sky that fills almost the whole canvas.
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Friedrich's The Monk by the Sea took him two years. He kept changing and overpainting it until only three bands were left (land, sea and sky), with one bare-headed monk and a few gulls.

“It is a seascape. First comes a barren sandy beach, then the unsettled sea, and then the air. Along the beach walks a man in a black robe, deep in thought; seagulls hover around him, shrieking anxiously, as if to warn him not to venture into the tempestuous waters.”

Caspar David Friedrich, describing The Monk by the Sea, probably in a lost letter to Johannes Schulze (1809 or 1810), translated

Infrared images made during the restoration of 2013 to 2016 show ships on the horizon in the underdrawing. Friedrich painted them out. I find that the most telling detail in the picture, because the empty sea was something he had to make.

Friedrich Schleiermacher urged that it be shown at the Berlin Academy exhibition of 1810, together with its companion, The Abbey in the Oakwood. King Frederick William III of Prussia bought both, and the Academy made Friedrich a member that same year. In autumn 2026 the pair hang in the Friedrich room on the upper floor of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

In October 1810 Heinrich von Kleist printed his review in the Berliner Abendblätter, his own newspaper. He built it on a text he had asked Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim to write, then cut and rewrote it. Looking at the picture feels "as if your eyelids have been cut away," Kleist wrote.

07Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich (c. 1817)

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, c. 1817 — A man in a dark green coat looks out over peaks rising from the fog, his back to us.
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Friedrich painted Wanderer above the Sea of Fog in about 1817. It belongs to the Stiftung Hamburger Kunstsammlungen, which bought it in 1970 and lends it to the Hamburger Kunsthalle. In October 2026 it was on display in the Kunsthalle's collection rooms.

Friedrich assembled the view from drawings made years apart. The cone-shaped mountain at left comes from a study of the Rosenberg in Bohemian Switzerland, drawn in May 1808, and the Zirkelstein answers it on the right. The rocks in the middle ground follow an 1808 drawing of the Gamrig near Rathen. The ledge under the walker's feet comes from a drawing he made while climbing the Kaiserkrone in Saxon Switzerland in June 1813.

His clothes mark him as a city dweller who has come out to look at nature. There are no reliable clues to who he is.

Friedrich often used a figure seen from behind, the Rückenfigur, and the Wanderer on his rocky summit is his most prominent one. You look over the man's shoulder at someone looking, so seeing becomes the subject of the picture.

German History in Documents and Images suggests that no other image in art history has graced more dust jackets of books on modernity. The painting also ranks among the world's 30 best-known paintings.

Between Friedrich and Marc

Between the Romantics and the Expressionists comes a small Munich canvas, Carl Spitzweg's The Poor Poet (1839), his most popular painting today. A poet lies on a mattress in a cold attic, under an umbrella that keeps off the rain dripping through the roof. He keeps working at his verses while his manuscripts wait by the stove as fuel.

Critics objected to its ironic view of the poor poet when it was first shown at the Munich Kunstverein in 1839. The picture belongs to the Bavarian State Painting Collections, and in autumn 2026 it hangs in the Sammlung Schack in Munich.

The 20th century: Der Blaue Reiter

Marc belonged to Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a circle that came together in Munich in 1911 around Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter and Marc himself. Its first exhibition opened at the Galerie Thannhauser in Munich that winter. The group scattered when the First World War began in 1914, and both Marc and August Macke died at the front.

08Blue Horse I, Franz Marc (1911)

Franz Marc, Blue Horse I, 1911 — A young blue horse lowers its head against rounded, brightly colored hills.
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Marc's Blue Horse I came to the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 1965 as a gift of the Bernhard and Elly Koehler Foundation. The museum holds the world's largest collection of Blue Rider art. In autumn 2026 the foal hangs in the Lenbachhaus's new Blue Rider display, Über die Welt hinaus, which runs until September 2027.

The foal stands stiff and angular, full of young strength, its head tilted to one side. White shows through its body, while the hooves and mane deepen to dark navy. Around it the colors work in complementary pairs: vermilion and green below, carmine and yellow, then violet, blue and orange above.

The colors follow a theory Marc set out in a letter to August Macke in December 1910. Blue was the masculine principle, austere and spiritual. Yellow was the feminine, gentle and cheerful, and red was matter, brutal and heavy.

The art historian Johannes Langner showed that Marc gave many of his animals the poses of traditional figure painting. Friedrich's figures absorbed in a view were among his models, which gives this foal its brooding, human air.

Marc's The Tower of Blue Horses, missing since the Second World War, carried the idea further. The Large Blue Horses of 1911 has been at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis since 1942. The foal also closes horse paintings from Stubbs to Marc.

Living with German painting

Our artists paint each of these eight German paintings by hand in oil, from Dürer in his fur-trimmed robe to Friedrich's walker above the fog. For Italy, France and the rest of Europe, our page of famous paintings from every country picks up where Germany stops.

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by Luciano Drehmer Published on October 15, 2026

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Frequently asked questions

What is German Expressionism?

It was an early 20th-century German movement that, in Tate's definition, valued the artist's inner feelings or ideas over a faithful record of reality, using simplified shapes, bright colors and expressive brushstrokes. Its first group, Die Brücke (The Bridge), was founded in Dresden in 1905 and led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel and Fritz Bleyl, with Emil Nolde a member for a short time. The second, Der Blaue Reiter, is the Munich group of Franz Marc and Kandinsky. From 1933 the Nazi party persecuted these modern artists, and many were forced to leave Germany.

Who were some famous German painters in the 18th century?

Three names are a good place to start, and two of them made their careers abroad. Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–1779), born in Bohemia and trained by his father, became court painter in Dresden in 1745 and served Charles III of Spain in Madrid from 1761 to 1771, in a Neoclassical style the writer Winckelmann helped shape. Johann Zoffany, born near Frankfurt am Main, settled in London in 1760, became the leading painter of conversation pieces in England, joined the Royal Academy in 1769 and worked in India from 1783 to 1789. The third is Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, the friend Goethe lodged with in Rome and the painter of Goethe in the Roman Campagna.

Was Hans Holbein the Younger German?

Yes. He was taught by his father, Hans Holbein the Elder, joined the Basel artists' guild in 1519 and is recorded in Lucerne, northern Italy and France before his English years, when he worked as Henry VIII's official court artist, according to the National Gallery. The gallery itself describes him as a German artist.

Where can you see the most paintings by Caspar David Friedrich?

In Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden. The Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Alte Nationalgalerie and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden hold the most important collections of his work, and together they run an online portal with around 250 of his paintings and drawings, including pictures too fragile to travel and drawings too sensitive to light to stay on view.

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