Carlos Nebel

(Hamburg, 1802 – Paris, 1855)

Author's artworks

19th Century German

Born to a wealthy German family, Carl Nebel was one of the many artists who travelled to Mexico to offer the European public insights into those at the time unknown lands. An architect and engineer by training, he was a precise and accomplished draughtsman, a skill he perfected in his prints. His first trip to Mexico, between 1829 and 1834, resulted in the creation of fifty lithographs, published in 1836 in a portfolio called Voyage pittoresque et archéologique dans la partie la plus intéressante du Méxique.

We know that Nebel was in Mexico in 1840, when he brought a court case against the Vicente García Torres print shop for plagiarism. During this trip he met a French woman who he married shortly afterwards in the Metropolitan Cathedral and reinvented himself as a pig farmer. In his works he also evokes scenes of the first Mexican-American war, that took place from 1846 to 1848 with the subsequent loss by Mexico of half of its national territory.

In 1848, now back in Germany with his family, he illustrated the war with twelve lithographs published in the book The War between the United States and Mexico, from 1851, co-authored with George Wilkins Kendall. Nebel died in Paris on 5 June 1855. His accounts of daily life and descriptions of social hierarchies and types favoured the emergence of genre painting.