Peter Edward Stroehling

Peter Edward Stroehling, also spelled Peter Eduard Ströhling, and sometimes Stroely or Straely (1768 – ), was a portrait artist from either Germany or the Russian Empire who spent his later years based in London. He worked in oils and in miniature and painted a number of royal portraits.

Life According to most accounts, Stroehling was born in 1768 in Düsseldorf. However, one biographer states that he was a Russian of German descent, educated at the expense of Catherine the Great. He worked in Paris, Mannheim, Frankfurt, and Mainz, and by about 1792 was studying in Italy. Early in 1796, he was in Vienna and the same year travelled to Saint Petersburg to attend the coronation of Paul I of Russia, taking with him a retinue of servants and representing himself as an English nobleman. He subsequently gained much portrait work in Saint Petersburg and stayed there until 1801.

From 1803 to 1807, he was in London, where like Johann Zoffany, he foresaw significantly better opportunities to make his name and fortune than at a German court, and was there again from 1819 to 1826. The same year he painted an unflattering portrait of the king's wife, Queen Charlotte (illustrated), which was owned by Queen Elizabeth II. His painting of Aloys I, Prince of Liechtenstein, is in the Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna.

Stroehling's image of the poet Ludwig Achim von Arnim is among his best-known work and is also the only well-known likeness of its subject. He also painted the Duke of Wellington, Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex, Princess Augusta Sophia, Princess Elizabeth, and the Italian contralto Giuseppina Grassini.

Publications P. E. Stroehling, Original Sketches drawn upon stone (London; printed by G. J. Vollweiler at the polytautographic office No. 9, Buckingham Place, Fitzroy Square)

Gallery