Frederick August Wenderoth

Frederick August Wenderoth or F. A. Wenderoth (1819 – 1884) was a German-born American painter and photographer. Born and educated in Cassel, where he first learned to paint from his father, he established a lifelong friendship with Charles Christian Nahl at school. During the 1840s period of political upheaval in Hesse, he moved to Paris, where he was joined by Nahl and his half-brother Arthur Nahl.

They moved to the US in 1848, living first in New York. They traveled by sea to California to join the Gold Rush. Unsuccessful as miners, Wenderoth and Nahl opened art studios, first in Sacramento and later in San Francisco, collaborating as painters, engravers and photographers.

After a trip to the South Seas and Australia, Wenderoth married and moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the East Coast, where he established a photography studio. In the late 1850s he worked for a period in South Carolina, going into partnership with Jesse Bolles. There, and later when he returned to Philadelphia, he created a number of innovative photographic techniques, such as the ivory-type and photozincography. Wenderoth died in 1884 of tuberculosis.

Early years Frederick August Wenderoth was born in 1819, in Cassel, Germany, to Carl Wenderoth, a painter; his mother was a lady-in-waiting at the Hesse-Kassel court. When he was a child, his father gave him painting lessons. Wenderoth and the Nahls left New York in March, traveled by ship to Havana, Cuba, then to Chagres, Panama. They crossed the Isthmus of Panama by foot, and from there took another ship to San Francisco, arriving there in May.

In 1858 he returned to Philadelphia. There Wenderoth worked for Harper's Weekly, producing illustrations and photographs.

In 1884 Wenderoth died in Philadelphia of tuberculosis.