Philipp Veit (13 February 1793 – 18 December 1877) was a German Romantic painter and one of the main exponents of the Nazarene movement. It is to Veit that the credit of having been the first to revive the nearly forgotten technique of fresco painting is due.
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Biography
Veit was born in Berlin, Prussia. He was the son of a banker, Simon Veit and his wife Brendel, daughter of Moses Mendelssohn. After Veit's parents divorced in 1799, Veit initially stayed with his mother and lived with her and her new husband Friedrich Schlegel in Jena, Paris, and Cologne. In 1806, he returned to his father in Berlin and finished his schooling in the "Graues Kloster". From 1808 on, Veit received his first art education at the Royal Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where he was taught by Friedrich Matthäi and Caspar David Friedrich, later in Vienna. Although a prodigious talent when it came to drawing, Veit was not comfortable with oil painting, for which reason in Vienna he took to the medium of watercolour. In Vienna, he made the acquaintance of Schlegel, and through him came to know several Viennese Romantics, one of whom was the poet and novelist Joseph von Eichendorff. He was strongly influenced by, and joined, the Nazarene movement in Rome, where he worked for some years before moving to Frankfurt.
In 1810, Veit converted to Catholicism together with his mother and his senior brother Johannes Veit. While participating in the struggle against Napoleon in 1813–14 (the German campaign of 1813 or War of the Sixth Coalition), first as a Lützower Jäger and part of the Lützow Free Corps, subsequently as a member of the Kleistsche Armeekorps, a corps led by Friedrich Graf Kleist von Nollendorf, and returning to Berlin for a short period, Veit became closer friends with the mentioned above poet Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff and his own lieutenant Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. Beginning in 1811, Veit was more teaching himself and finished a couple of portraits (Zichy-Vásonykeő, Julie Gräfin, lost; Franz Xaver von Baader and other members of Vienna's society and exponents of Romanticism). In 1815, he finished his first religious painting. Virgin with Christ and St John, a votive painting for the church of St James in Heiligenstadt, Vienna. The painting shows already close ties to the Nazarene movement and thus was inspired by the style of Pietro Perugino and Raphael.