Munich School (Greek: Σχολή του Μονάχου) is the name given to a group of painters who worked in Munich or were trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Munich (German: Münchner Akademie der Bildenden Künste) between 1850 and 1918. In the second half of the 19th century the Academy became one of the most important institutions in Europe for training artists and attracted students from across Europe and the United States.
Munich was an important center of painting and visual art in the period between 1850 and 1914. The mid-century movement away from the Romanticism and emphasis on fresco painting of the earlier Munich school was led by Karl von Piloty, who was a professor at the Munich Academy from 1856 and became its director in 1874. Piloty's approach to history painting was influenced by the French academician Paul Delaroche, and by the painterly colorism of Rubens and the Venetians. Besides Piloty, other influential teachers at the Academy were Wilhelm von Diez (1839–1907), Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Arthur von Ramberg. and Nikolaos Gyzis.
Artists of the Munich School include Anton Braith, Alfred Kowalski, Hans Makart, Gabriel Max, Victor Müller, Fritz Osswald, Franz von Lenbach, Friedrich Kaulbach, Wilhelm Leibl, Wilhelm Trübner, and the genre painters Franz Defregger, Eduard von Grützner and Hermann von Kaulbach. and Miroslav Kraljević.
- Brooklyn Museum, Triumph of Realism: an exhibition of European and American realist paintings,1850–1910. University of California, 1967.
- Greenville County Museum of Art, and Martha R. Severens. Greenville County Museum of Art: The Southern Collection. New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Greenville County Museum of Art, 1995.
- Norman, Geraldine, Nineteenth-Century Painters and Painting: A Dictionary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
