Zenff, Carl August

Karl August Zenff was born on February 28 ( March 11 ) in 1770 in the village of Kraipau near the German Merseburg in the family of the Protestant Theologian Karl Friedrich Zenf (1739-1814). Initially, Karl Zenff planned to study medicine , but inclinations identified him for art. At the age of eighteen, Zenff entered the Leipzig Academy of Arts, where from 1788 to 1793 he studied drawing with Adam Friedrich Ezer . Since 1795, he studied under Christian Leberecht Vogel , a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden . Until 1802, Zenff was a private student and freelance artist.

In 1803, with the patronage of his brother-in-law, professor of astronomy Knorre , Zenff was invited to Derpt ( Tartu ) to teach painting and copper engraving at the newly opened university . In 1818 he received the title of extraordinary professor of drawing at the University of Dorpat, despite the fact that there was no department of drawing at other Russian universities. At the university, Zenff founded a special study for the "drawing school collection."

He died on January 2 ( 14 ), 1838 in Dorpat.

The artist Adolf Zenff was his brother.

Carl August Zenff specialized in engravings, pastel painting and graphic art. He was a representative of classicism. As an engraver, Zenff left a memory for himself with portraits of Wittgenstein and Field Marshal Barclay de Tolly. A portrait of M. A. Protasova is also curious, under which Zhukovsky wrote his poem: " Poetry is God in the holy dreams of the earth ." Zenff engraved almost exclusively portraits of Baltic figures.

• Zenff, Karl-August // Russian Biographical Dictionary : in 25 volumes. - SPb. - M. , 1896-1918.
• Zenff, Karl August // Biographical Dictionary of professors and teachers of the Imperial Yuryevsky, former Derpt University for a hundred years of its existence (1802-1902) / G.V. Levitsky is an ordinary professor at Imperial Yuryevsky University. - Yuriev: Printing house of K. Mattisen, 1902. - T. I. - S. 460-463. - 666 p.