Wilhelm Trübner

Wilhelm Trübner (February 3, 1851 – December 21, 1917) was a German realist painter of the circle of Wilhelm Leibl.

Biography Trübner was born in Heidelberg. He was the third son of a silver- and goldsmith, Johann Georg Trübner, and his wife Anna Maria. In 1867 he began training as a goldsmith in Hanau, and met classicist painter Anselm Feuerbach who encouraged him to study painting. This had an immediate impact on many of the city's young artists, who found Courbet's approach an invigorating alternative to the shopworn academic tradition.

In 1870 he made the acquaintance of Carl Schuch and Albert Lang. In August 1871, the three artists painted landscapes together during hikes in Hohenschwangau and Bernried, where they met Leibl. By urging the viewer to discover beauty in a painting's formal values, its colors, proportions, and surface, Trübner advanced a philosophy of "art for art's sake". In 1901 he joined the recently formed Berlin Secession, at the time Germany's most important forum for the exhibition of avant-garde art. From 1903 until his death in 1917 he was a professor at the Academy of Arts in Karlsruhe, also serving as director from 1904 to 1910.

Trübner's paintings are in many public collections, especially in Germany, including the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, and the Neue Pinakothek in Munich.

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