Paul Friedrich Meyerheim

Paul Friedrich Meyerheim was born on 13 July 1842 in Berlin, the son of the painter Friedrich Eduard Meyerheim. He received his first artistic training from his father before studying at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, roughly from 1857 to 1860, and afterward traveled through Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Tyrol, and spent more than a year in Paris.

Meyerheim built his reputation chiefly as a painter of animals, favoring circus performers, menageries, and exotic and domestic animal subjects, alongside portraits, still life, and decorative work. He won a Gold Medal for art in Paris in 1866, followed by further medals in Berlin (1868 and 1872), a bronze medal at the Vienna World's Fair in 1873, a second-class medal in Munich in 1883, a prize diploma at the Dresden watercolor exhibition in 1887, and the Prussian Order of the Red Eagle, 4th Class, on 18 January 1879. A single period source also credits him with a cycle of seven loggia paintings commissioned by the Borsig locomotive works in Moabit, Berlin, with nine seasonal decorative paintings for the upper wall fields of the Nationalgalerie's third story, and states that he served as a professor at the Berlin Hochschule fur die bildenden Kunste from 1887; none of these three details has a second independent source confirming it. Meyerheim died in Berlin on 14 September 1915. One source states he was buried at the city's Friedrichsfelde Cemetery, a detail not independently corroborated.

Meyerheim's standing in his own time rested on a steady record of Academy training and exhibition medals, including a gold medal in Paris (1866), gold medals in Berlin (1868 and 1872), a bronze medal at the Vienna World's Fair (1873), and the Prussian Order of the Red Eagle, 4th Class (1879), a body of recognition that Boetticher's contemporary lexicon of nineteenth-century painters records in detail. No verbatim quotations from named critics writing in major contemporary periodicals were located in the available record, so this assessment rests on documented Academy and exhibition honors rather than on signed press reviews.

Meyerheim's auction market is thin and unevenly documented, which is typical for many well-regarded but secondary-tier academic painters of his generation. The most reliably documented result is Sidi, A Poodle with a Tennis Racket, sold at Bonhams for GBP 51,200 including premium. Lempertz has sold his circus scene Aus dem Zirkusleben for EUR 24,990 including premium and another animal subject, Best Friends, for EUR 7,560. A market compilation, Art.Salon, separately cites a considerably higher figure, USD 229,000 for German Sideshow Tricks in April 2008, as the artist's all-time high, but the auction house, city, and exact sale date for that transaction are not confirmed in any primary saleroom record and should be treated as unverified rather than as an established benchmark.

Meyerheim's market is small, and the highest price attributed to him in secondary compilations, USD 229,000 for German Sideshow Tricks in 2008, cannot be traced to a named auction house or an exact sale date, while confirmed results such as GBP 51,200 at Bonhams and EUR 24,990 at Lempertz sit well below that figure. Collectors should treat any single reported price with caution, verify provenance directly against documented exhibition and honor history, and rely on the absence of a catalogue raisonne as a reason to lean more heavily on such documentation when evaluating a given work.