Ernst August Hagen

Ernst August Hagen (12 April 1797 - 15 February 1880) was a Prussian writer on art and novelist. He taught at Königsberg University and was the first Prussian scholar to hold a teaching chair in Art history and Aesthetics. Family provenance and connections Ernst August Hagen was born in Königsberg, at that time the administrative capital of East Prussia (and for almost a decade after 1806 when the king fled from Berlin, the home of the Prussian Court). His father, Karl Gottfried Hagen (1749-1829) was a distinguished chemist and the court apothecary. The family was intellectually distinguished and well connected socially. Ernst August's older brother, Carl Heinrich Hagen (1785-1856) was a professor of law and economics and a senior government official who had become became an early and prominent advocate of free trade after studying the work of Adam Smith. A cousin, Gotthilf Hagen (1797-1884), was notable as a hydraulic engineer. His younger sister, Florentine Hagen (1800-1838), later married the physicist-mathematician Franz Ernst Neumann (1798-1895); and as the result of the marriage of his elder sister, Johanna Hagen (1794-1885), he was also a brother-in-law to the astronomer-physicist Friedrich Bessel (1784-1846). In 1807/08, when he was 11, Ernst August and his brothers were taught by their father in the court apothecary, alongside the royal princes Friedrich Wilhelm and Wilhelm.