Torre Paterno das alte Laurentum

German painter and etcher. He revealed an interest in art while still at school and, though he began to study theology in Leipzig in 1778, he soon transferred to the private art academy of Adam Friedrich Oeser (1717–99). Here he made copies of the work of his teacher and drew after plaster casts of antique statues. The Liber Veritatis, a collection of 200 drawings by Claude Lorrain, was also used as a model and had an important influence on him. In 1783 he went to Dresden where he was especially attracted to the Dutch landscape paintings in the Gemäldegalerie. In 1785 Reinhart returned to Leipzig where he made the acquaintance of the German poet Friedrich Schiller, with whom he had a lifelong friendship, and to whom he later dedicated an etching of a heroic landscape (1800). From 1786 to 1789, while resident at the court of the Duke of Sachsen-Meiningen, he explored the Thuringian countryside on foot, making sketches as he went. A sketchbook from that time (1788; Hannover) reveals that he had freed himself from academic stiffness, combining a free, painterly approach with the faithful observation of nature; it is also clear that he understood structure and the principles of select emphasis and composition.