Karl Friedrich Hermann Lungkwitz (1813-1891) was an Early Texas landscape painter and photographer. Hermann Lungkwitz was born on March 14, 1813 in Halle-an-der-Saale, Saxony, while Napoleon's artillery bombarded the city. The majority of three hundred fifty extant Lungkwitz works are pencil and oil studies from Europe. His Romantic landscape paintings of the Texas Hill Country, old San Antonio, its Spanish missions, and Austin, were painted over four decades, documenting nineteenth-century Texas. Two pre-Civil War lithographs (Dr. Ernest Kapp's Water-Cure, Comal County, Texas and Fredericksburg, Texas) and one postwar lithograph (San Antonio de Bexar) have been identified.

     Lungkwitz completed his paintings in his studio, based on careful pencil drawings done at favorite locales like Enchanted Rock, Bear Mountain, and other promontories north of Fredericksburg, which Lungkwitz called the Granite Mountains, and the Guadalupe, Pedernales, Llano, and Colorado river valleys. Reflecting his training at the Dresden Academy, his detailed paintings are luminous with bright earth colors.

     Lungkwitz studied with Adrian Ludwig Richter, a Romantic landscapist, at the Royal Academy in Dresden from 1840-1843. Lungkwitz received a certificate of achievement from the Academy for a view of the Elbe River in the latter year. During three summers, he painted the Austrian Salzkammergut and Upper Bavarian Alps. Until 1850, when he emigrated to America with his family, Lungkwitz was probably a professional artist in Dresden. He may have had to flee Saxony because of participation in the revolution of 1848-49 and insurrection against the Saxon king in May 1849.

     After six months in Wheeling, West Virginia, Lungkwitz, his artist brother-in-law Friedrich Richard Petri, and their families, left for Texas. He arrived in New Braunfels in July 1851, remaining six months before moving west to Fredericksburg, where they settled on a farm in 1852, where Lungkwitz remained until 1864. Not surprisingly, on the harsh, hill-country frontier, the two artists could not make a living from their painting, so they resorted to farming and raising cattle.

     When Petri died in 1857, Lungkwitz learned photography, a profession that he followed in San Antonio with Carl G. von Iwonskiqv from 1866 until 1870. Between 1859 and 1861 Lungkwitz, Wilhelm Carl Augustus Thielepape, and photographer William DeRyee, visited New Braunfels, Austin, the Texas Hill Country, Indianola, and towns along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers exhibiting their works and giving magic-lantern shows.

     Moving to Austin in 1870, he was employed as a draftsman and photographer for the General Land Office. His daughter Martha may have been the first woman employee of the state of Texas when she was appointed a clerk in the Office. Lungkwitz apparently did not paint during his tenure on this job. When he lost his employment in 1874 after a change in political administration, he began to paint again in and around Austin and the Texas Hill Country for the next fifteen years.