A Best Friend

Haag Carel was born in 1820 in Erlangen. He was a 19th – 20th century painter, active in England and Germany.

Haag was a painter of genre paintings, portraits, architectural scenes, landscapes, oriental subjects. He was also a gouache painter, watercolorists, miniaturist, draughtsman.

He was a pupil of Albert Reindel at the Academy of Nuremburg, also master teachers Peter von Cornélius and Wilhelm von Kaulbach in Munich.

He travelled to Belgium, France, Italy, Syria and Egypt. He shared a studio in Cairo with British Orientalist painter Frederick Goodall. Thereafter he settled in two places in London and in his studio in Oberwesel on the Rhine.

He was a member of the Society of Painters in Watercolour and the Royal Society of British Artists. He was a court painter to the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

In 1859 he stayed in Jerusalem, where he was privileged, at the request of the Queen of England, to be allowed inside the Mosque of Omar, to paint the Holy Rock, placed under the dome, where no painter had ever been able to put his easel.

He showed more than eighty works in an exhibition dedicated to him at the German Athenaum in London. He also exhibited in Vienna, where he was awarded a medal in 1873; in Paris, for the Universal Exhibition in 1878. He was promoted to Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur that same year.

He gradually abandoned oil painting to devote himself exclusively to watercolors, developing his own technique. He made an application of pure colours in superimposed washes, dotting with the tip of the brush, then scraping off the excess colour to obtain the light tones.

He painted a large number of orientalist pictures, including Strolling Musicians of Cairo, al-Ghouri Mosque, Cairo, Danger in the Desert, landscapes with figures, after sites in the Tyrol and Italy.

He also painted architectural motifs and women portraits.

Today, his works can be found in private and public collections, including in museums in Blackburn, Bristol, London, Manchester.

He died on January 24 in 1915, Oberwesel-Rhine, Germany.