Albert Christoph Dies

Albert Christoph Dies (175528 December 1822) was a German painter, engraver, and biographer most noted for his biography of Joseph Haydn, although it is now considered sentimental and not entirely accurate. As an artist, he is also not very well-regarded.

As painter Dies was born in Hanover (baptized 11 February 1755), and began his studies there. For one year he studied in the academy of Düsseldorf, and then he started at the age of twenty with thirty ducats in his pocket for Rome,

Goethe visited him in 1787. The poet, interested in the theory of color, reported in his , "At the moment I am engaged in something from which I learn a great deal; I have found and sketched a landscape that a clever artist, Dies, colored in my presence; thus eyes and mind grow ever more accustomed to color and harmony."

During the Rome visit, Dies also composed music, though later on he apparently destroyed all that he had written, and none of it survives today. the series of plates known as the Collection de vues pittoresques de l'Italie, published in seventy-two sheets at Nuremberg in 1799.

Compared with another biography written at the same time by Georg August Griesinger, Dies's work is almost certainly less accurate and is more likely to have been sentimentalized and embellished. For instances of probable embellishment, see Mathias Haydn and Haydn and Mozart; for an apparent outright blunder, see Rebecca Schroeter. Dies's translator Vernon Gotwals, comparing Dies to Griesinger, concludes:

It is now clear that for facts about Haydn one will turn first to the Biographische Notizen of Griesinger, but that reliance upon that source alone would deprive Haydn's portrait of many authentic details, mixed inescapably with some imaginary ones. Dies's Biographische Nachrichten is the work of a sentimental artist who fancied himself a "universal man" but whose approach to the problem of biography was that of his time and place.

Death In 1787, he accidentally swallowed of lead acetate. He never recovered from the ensuing lead poisoning, which caused the loss of use of one of his hands, and eventually died in Vienna on 28 December 1822.

Assessment Dies is perhaps better known today from his acquaintanceship (e.g. Goethe, Haydn) than from his own merits as an artist or writer.

The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition gives harsh opinions of Dies's work as an artist:

"[In Rome] he became a bold executant in water-colours and in oil, though he failed to acquire any originality of his own." "Lord Bristol, who encouraged him as a copyist, predicted that he would be a second Salvator Rosa. However, Dies did not have the creativity necessary to become a great artist." "With so many irons in the fire Dies naturally lost the power of concentration." "From two pictures now in the Belvedere gallery, and from numerous engraved drawings from the neighborhood of Tivoli, we gather that Dies was never destined to rise above a respectable mediocrity. He followed Salvator Rosa's example in imitating the manner of Claude Lorrain. But Salvator adapted the style of Claude, whilst Dies did no more than copy it."

Gotwals writes, "Friedrich Noack in his article in the Thieme and Becker Allgemeines Lexicon der bildenden Künstler ["General lexicon of graphic artists"], describes Dies's work as clumsy, mediocre, and prosaic.

Gotwals adds, concerning Dies's writing, that "his literary style is hardly better."

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