Albert Christoph Dies

Albert Christoph Dies (1755 – 28 December 1822) was a German painter, composer, and biographer.

Dies was born in Hanover (baptized 11 February 1755), and began his studies there. For one year he studied in the academy of Düsseldorf, and then he started at the age of twenty with thirty ducats in his pocket for Rome, studying briefly on the way in Mannheim and Basel. In Rome he lived a frugal life till 1796; his son Johannes (Giovanni) was born there in 1776. Copying pictures, chiefly by Salvator Rosa, for a livelihood, his taste led him to draw and paint from nature in Tivoli, Albano and other picturesque places in the vicinity of Rome. Naples, the birthplace of his favorite master, he visited more than once for the same reasons.

Goethe visited him in 1787. The poet, interested in the theory of color, reported in his Zweiter römischer Aufenthalt "At the moment I am engaged in something from which I learn a great deal; I have found and sketched a landscape that a clever artist, Dies, colored in my presence; thus eyes and mind grow ever more accustomed to color and harmony."

During the Rome visit, Dies also composed music, though later on he apparently destroyed all that he had written, and none of it survives today.

At one point, Jacques-Louis David, then composing his Oath of the Horatii (1784) at Rome, wished to take him to Paris. But Dies had reasons for not accepting the offer. He was courting a young Roman whom he subsequently married. Meanwhile, he had made the acquaintance of Volpato, for whom he executed numerous drawings, and this no doubt suggested the plan, which he afterwards carried out, of publishing, in partnership with Jacob Wilhelm Mechau, Johann Christian Reinhart and Johann Friedrich Frauenholz, the series of plates known as the Collection de vues pittoresques de l'Italie, published in seventy-two sheets at Nuremberg in 1799.

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