Why Julius Friedrich Anton Schrader matters
Julius Friedrich Anton Schrader was a mid-nineteenth-century German painter trained in the Prussian Academy system and the Düsseldorf school, whose history paintings and portraits carried him to a professorship at the Berlin Academy and a place in the Nationalgalerie's permanent collection. For a collector, he represents a category common to nineteenth-century academic painting: real institutional standing in his own time and a small, thinly documented auction footprint today.
- Born
- 1815-06-16, Berlin, Kingdom of Prussia (now Germany)
- Nationality
- German
- Media
- Painting
- Movement
- Düsseldorf school of painting
- Education
- Königliche Akademie der Künste (Prussian Academy of Arts), Berlin; five years at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, circa 1837 to 1842, under Wilhelm von Schadow
- Signature motifs
- History painting, Formal portraiture
By the numbers
- 1815 to 1900LifespanBorn and died in Berlin
- From 1851Berlin Academy professorKönigliche Akademie der Künste, Berlin
- LotSearch: 4 lotsRecorded auction lotsAll sold at Bonhams, London; highest price found is USD 13,574 hammer (2001)
- Nationalgalerie, BerlinMuseum collectionPortrait of Leopold von Ranke, 1868
Biography
Julius Friedrich Anton Schrader, also recorded as Julius Friedrich Antonio Schrader, was born in Berlin on 16 June 1815. He trained first at the Königliche Akademie der Künste, the Prussian Academy of Arts, in Berlin, and then spent five years at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf as a student of Wilhelm von Schadow, placing him within the Düsseldorf school of painting. Between 1845 and 1847 he traveled and studied in Italy, and he also spent time in England, the Netherlands, and Belgium, where the colorism of Louis Gallait and Édouard De Bièfve influenced his approach to paint.
Schrader built his reputation as a history and portrait painter. Sources, including his Wikipedia entry, cite works from this period such as Calais to Edward III (1847), Frederick the Great after the Battle of Kolin (1849), Leonardo da Vinci (1851), Milton and His Daughters (1855), and Cromwell at the Deathbed of his Daughter (1859). He was appointed professor at the Königliche Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1851, a position that placed him at the center of the Prussian state art system. In 1868 he painted a Portrait of Leopold von Ranke, now held in the Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. According to Wikipedia and Artnet, he died in Berlin on 16 February 1900.
Critical reception
No verbatim, attributable review of Schrader's work by a named critic in a major outlet could be located in the sources consulted, so none is quoted here. What is documented is institutional recognition rather than press commentary: his training under Wilhelm von Schadow placed him within the influential Düsseldorf school, his time in Belgium shaped his color sense under the example of Louis Gallait and Édouard De Bièfve, and his 1851 appointment to the Berlin Academy professorship reflects the esteem in which the Prussian state art establishment held his history paintings and portraits. The continued presence of his Portrait of Leopold von Ranke in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin is the clearest ongoing institutional marker of his standing.
Market
Schrader's auction footprint is small and only partially documented across public price databases. LotSearch's own dataset identifies its highest recorded price for the artist as a hammer price of USD 13,574 for a painting titled Italian Women in a Vineyard near Rome, sold at Bonhams, London, on 28 March 2001. LotSearch lists four lots by the artist in total, all sold at Bonhams London, with the remaining three realizing prices in the low to mid four figure range in euros. Subscription-only databases such as Artprice and Artnet were not fully accessible for this review, so the Bonhams 2001 result should be read as the highest price found in the sources consulted rather than a confirmed, cross-database all-time record. Collectors should treat any single Schrader sale price as a data point from a thin market rather than as evidence of a stable price trend.
Selected exhibitions
| Years | Exhibition | Venues |
|---|---|---|
| before 1837 | Academic training | Königliche Akademie der Künste (Prussian Academy of Arts), Berlin |
| circa 1837 to 1842 | Study under Wilhelm von Schadow | Kunstakademie Düsseldorf |
| 1845 to 1847 | Study travel | Italy |
| from 1851 | Professorship | Königliche Akademie der Künste, Berlin |
| 1868 | Portrait of Leopold von Ranke completed | Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
Museum collections
- Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Awards and honors
- Professor, Königliche Akademie der Künste, Berlin (Prussian Academy of Arts) (1851)
Authentication and provenance
No catalogue raisonne.
No catalogue raisonne has been identified for this artist, and no certificate-of-authenticity program is documented. Because the artist died in 1900, works are generally authenticated through provenance research and connoisseurship rather than a studio or foundation process.
Primary reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Schrader
What collectors should know
There is no catalogue raisonne for Schrader and no formal authentication program; verification rests on provenance research and connoisseurship, which is typical for a painter who died in 1900. No current gallery or estate representation is documented. His market is thin, with only a handful of confirmed auction results and no reliably sourced all-time record price, so collectors should expect limited comparable data and should verify any offered work's provenance carefully rather than relying on a single benchmark sale.
Further reading and resources
Data current as of 2026-07-10.

