Jakob Lorenz
Ritter

Brother of Paul the Elder; father of William.

He was a student of Karl Alexander and Manfred Heideloff at the Polytechnic. In the 1850s he temporarily worked for the publishing houses Ernst and Korn in Berlin and Ebner and Seubert in Stuttgart together with his brother Paul where they produced drawings and engravings for architectural works. Around 1860 he founded a studio for steel engravings of architectural subjects where he trained students and worked together with a team for customers from other cities, e.g. for Conrad Böhrer. Mainly in the 1870s he made study trips in Germany and to Denmark, France, Italy, Austria and to Prague. Next to his brother Paul he was one of the most important architectural painters in Nuremberg in the second half of the 19th century. Extraordinary attention to detail is characteristic for his pictures which reflect the everyday life through the staffages in a realistic way. Ritter was mainly a watercolorist and an etcher. He painted only a few oil paintings. (…) His graphic oeuvre consists mainly of etched series of scenic views of Nuremberg, which were published in 1871 as single sheets in Nuremberg and some years later as a portfolio in Berlin. (…) He was an honorary member of the Artists´ Association, Member of the Nuremberg artists´ cooperative society, member of the Association for the History of the City of Nuremberg (…) Quoted from Nürnberger Künstlerlexikon ed.by Manfrad Grieb