Frans Seraph Hanfstaengl Biography
Franz Seraph Hanfstaengl (Beiernrain, 1 March 1804 - Munich, 18 April 1877) was a German painter, lithographer and photographer. Hanfstaengl was born into a middle-class family. In 1816, on the recommendation of the village teacher, he was sent to Munich to study drawing at the school led by Hermann Josef Mitterer. He was educated in lithography, had contact with Alois Senefelder and studied from 1819 to 1825 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 1826, he went to Dresden and began his great work, completed in 1852, of copying in lithography canvases from the Dresden Gallery. Between 1835 and 1852 Hanfstaengl brought out around 200 lithographic reproductions of masterpieces from the Dresden picture gallery, and published them in a portfolio. When he returned to Munich, he left his Dresden factory to his brothers Max and Hans. In 1833 he founded his own lithographic establishment in Munich, which operated until 1868, and to which he later added a fine print art shop and (in 1853) a photographic workshop. Hanfstaengl gained much popularity as a portrait lithographer in Munich society, being nicknamed 'Count Litho'. In 1855, through the first retouching of a photographic negative, he marked the beginning of photo retouching. Later, he became a court photographer and created portraits of illustrious people, including the young King Ludwing II, Franz Liszt, Otto von Bismarck and Empress Elisabeth of Austria. In 1858 Hanfstaengl instructed the famous French photographer Antoine Samuel Adam-Salomon. He influenced his brother-in-law, the Austrian physician, inventor and politician Norbert Pfretzschner Senior, in the evolution of the dry photographic plate in 1866.
