Charles Frederick de Brocktorff

Charles Frederick de Brocktorff ( 1775/1785 – 1850) was a German-Danish artist and army officer who is best-known for painting watercolours of Malta in the first half of the 19th century.

Life

Brocktorff is believed to have been born sometime between 1775 and 1785.

He served as a officer in the British Army's King's German Legion and fought in the Napoleonic Wars. He resigned in 1809 and moved to the United Kingdom, and in around 1810 he moved to the island of Malta, then a British protectorate, where he settled. He opened a studio in Valletta and he became a successful artist. His family was also involved in the business, and four of his sons became artists as well.

Two albums containing a total of 89 watercolours by Brocktorff are located at the National Library of Malta. One of them had originally belonged to Frederick Ponsonby, and it was collected in around 1829 or 1830 when Ponsonby was Governor of Malta. The other was compiled in around 1849 by Henry Benjamin Hanbury Beaufoy after he had purchased the watercolours from an auction of the contents of Stowe House. Both albums were acquired by the library in the 1920s, and studies of their contents were published in 2007 and 2008.

His sons Frederick, Luigi, Giuseppe and Leopold de Brockdorff published several lithographic prints in Malta in the 19th century.