Karl Altmann was born in the Franconian town Feuchtwangen in 1802 and grew up in Ansbach. As his talents in art began to show as early as in his childhood, his father desisted from his son's initially planned career in science and enabled him to attend a painters school in Munich, followed by three years at the Dresden Academy from 1819 to 1822.

He also took an extensive journey through Italy, after which Altmann settled in Munich, where he found his motifs in the landscape at the Bavarian foothills of the Alps and in the mountains. His rural genre pieces, often narrated in anecdote style, show folk festivals, inns, scenes with hunters, smugglers and bandits. As far as his style is concerned, Altmann was clos...