Carl von Perbandt

Carl von Perbandt (12 May 1832 – 6 April 1911) was a German landscape painter and member of the Düsseldorf school of painting. He travelled to the United States in 1870 and spent most of his career in Northern California where he lived from 1876 until 1903. Many of his paintings were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. However, the Oakland Museum and the Crocker Art Museum hold two of his landscapes and several more are held in private collections.

Life and career Perbandt was born into an aristocratic German-speaking family in Langendorf, East Prussia. He studied painting under Andreas Achenbach and Carl Friedrich Lessing at the Düsseldorf Academy, although his determination to become an artist and his refusal to pursue a military career displeased his family. In 1859 he married Maria Treusch von Buttlar-Brandenfels. The couple had two sons, Conradin and Martin. After he served in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Perbandt and his family went to live on his brother's estate in Falkenhorst, East Prussia. Shortly thereafter he left Prussia "under a cloud", leaving his wife and children behind. He went first to the east coast of the United States where he was based in New York City and is known to have produced landscape paintings of scenes in New Jersey, Vermont, and Ulster County, New York.

In 1876 Perbandt moved to Northern California. He travelled and painted with Jules Tavernier in Monterey and eventually settled in San Francisco in 1877 where at times he shared a studio with Henry Raschen (1854-1937). Raschen was born in Prussia but had emigrated with his family to California when he was a boy. Perbandt and Raschen also travelled together "living the bohemian life" and painting scenes in Northern California, particularly Sonoma, Humboldt, and Mendocino counties. For a while, they lived in Fort Ross among the Pomo Indians and shared a studio there.

Gallery