Heinrich Lossow’s best known works

Quick facts

Heinrich Lossow (1840-1897) was a German painter, illustrator, and curator whose work bridged academic respectability and underground erotica. Born into an artistic dynasty as the son of sculptor Arnold Hermann Lossow (who moved from Bremen to Munich in 1820 to study under Ernest Mayer), Heinrich was raised in a creative household. Arnold H. Lossow had three artistic sons: Carl became a historical painter, Friedrich a wildlife painter, and Heinrich Lossow would outlive both siblings to become the most commercially successful and controversial of the three.

Heinrich Lossow was born March 10, 1840, in Munich, Germany, and died May 19, 1897, in Schleissheim, Germany. He lived for 57 years, 2 months, and 9 days—a total of 20,889 days.

Heinrich first trained under his father Arnold, then started studying in Munich’s academy of fine arts. He studied at the workshop, and in the studio of Karl Theodor von Piloty. He refined his painting skill on various trips in France and Italy during 1870 .

As a genre painter, Heinrich Lossow drew his inspiration largely from 18th-century Rococo aesthetics. Heinrich Lossow’s Rococo revival style was highly in demand throughout late 19th-century Europe, and his paintings and engravings of bucolic rural scenes with abundant nymphs and cupids kept him busy. The German painter and engraver Heinrich Lossow was in many ways typical of his time—a skilled genre artist growing up in Munich’s artistic community—yet these factors helped shape Heinrich Lossow into both a notorious and commercially successful artist.

Erotic subjects seem to have been much in Lossow’s mind as he reached middle age, as this was also when he produced the set of etchings entitled Ein Treue Diener, though most of his work was more standard fare, including the publish of a set of illustrations for a new edition of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Lossow was a prolific pornographer in his spare time, and several of his most salacious art work can be found online. Heinrich Lossow was also the author of a production of the Metamorphoses and the Triumph of Cupid, which were inspired by erotic and even pornographic iconography which is a highly sought after collector’s item. Heinrich Lossow also published a collection of twelve engraved plates illustrating scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, published by Friedrich Adolf Ackermann.

Toward the end of his life he served as a curator at Munich’s Schleissheim Palace.