signed, dated and inscribed ‘13t März 50./ Ali/ JH [interlaced]/ 4.’
graphite
10.5 x 16.1 cm
Hübner was born in Oleśnica in 1806, and by the age of eleven, both of his parents
had died, leaving the young Julius an orphan. By the age of fourteen, Hübner’s artistic
ambitions were evident, and a year later he embarked on his artistic career as a student at
the Berlin Academy where he studied under Wilhelm von Schadow (1789-1862). Hübner
became close friends with several fellow students, including Theodor Hildebrandt (1804-
1874), Karl Friedrich Lessing (1808-1880) and Karl Sohn (1805-1867), as well as with Von
Schadow himself. When the latter was appointed director of the Academy in Düsseldorf,
Hübner and his friends followed him there. [1] Under the supervision of Von Schadow,
Hübner and his close friends formed an artistic collective known as the Düsseldorf Schule.
Strongly influenced by literary sources, these artists produced works in a variety of media,
unified in a coherent style that bore the clear influence of the Nazarene movement.
Hübner’s clean, highly stylised and technically refined drawing’s style is reminiscent, for
example, of those by artists such as Friedrich Overbeck (1789-1869) and Julius Schnorr
von Carolsfeld (1794-1872).

In 1829, Hübner married Pauline Bendemann, the sister of his artist-friend Eduard
Bendemann. In that same year, the couple went off to Italy for a long sojourn. In 1842,
Hübner was appointed Professor of History Painting at the Royal Academy of Dresden, and
later served as its director from 1871 to 1882, the year of his death. While in Dresden, the
Hübners became close friends with Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Robert and Clara
Schumann, who composed a march for the their 50th wedding anniversary.

While Julius Hübner primarily treated portraits and history subjects in his paintings,
his drawings give a valuable glimpse into the artist’s private life. That the family dog ‘Ali’,
shown in the present sheet while asleep, must have been a much-loved member of the
Hübner family, is attested by the fact that the dog appears in the artists drawings, prints
and paintings. In this little sheet, which Hübner drew on the 13th of March 1850, Ali is
shown reclining on a cushion. While swiftly drawn from life, the sheet is a refined token of
the artist’s love for his dog. Ali is furthermore shown in a lithograph, also from 1850, and in
a painting from a year later. [2]

[1] M. Sitt et al., Lexikon der Düsseldorfer Malerschule. 1819-1918. Band 2. Haach - Murtfeldt, Munich,
1998, p 145.
[2] See https://www.juliushuebner.de/DE/1851_der_hund_ali.html [accessed 13 May 2025].