Kaulbach, WILHELM VON, a German painter, was born at Arolsen, in the principality of Waldeck, 15th October 1805, and in his seventeenth year entered the Academy of Arts at Düsseldorf.
He was one of Cornelius's best pupils, and followed him to Munich; from 1849 down to the year of his death he was director of the Academy of Painting in that city. Although painting in the severely ideal and allegorical spirit of his master, Kaublach displayed from the first no lack of individual genius. Among his first important productions were sixteen mural paintings illustrating the myth of Amor and Psyche, in the palace of Duke Maximilian, and Apollo amongst the Muses, for a ceiling in the Odeon. Then he executed a number of designs from the works of Klopstock, Wieland, and Goethe in various royal apartments in Munich. In 1834 Kaublach completed his grandiose 'Battle of the Huns,' representing the legend of the struggle, continued in mid-air, between the souls of the Huns and Romans who had fallen before the walls of Rome, which was regarded as the culmination of the new German school. Nevertheless, the realistic tendencies of his genius came out in his illustrations of Schiller, Goethe's Faust, and Reineke Fuchs, and in his 'Mad-house.' In 1846 Kaublach completed, on the heroic scale, the 'Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus.' For several years from 1847 onwards he was occupied painting the walls of the vestibule of the new museum at Berlin with a cycle illustrating the progress of civilisation. This series embraced six colossal compositions—'The Tower of Babel,' the 'Glorious Age of Greece,' the 'Destruction of Jerusalem,' the 'Battle of the Huns,' the 'Crusades,' and the 'Reformation,' with numerous smaller designs. His last gigantic painting is the 'Sea-fight of Salamis' in the Maximilianum at Munich. In his later years he composed illustrations to Goethe and Shakespeare, and painted many portraits. He died of cholera at Munich, 7th April 1874. See Mrs Howitt-Watt's Art-Student in Munich (2d ed. 1879).—His son, HERMANN, born at Munich on 26th July 1846, studied under Piloty, and paints historical pictures of the genre class—such as 'Louis XI. and Olivier le Dain,' 'Mozart's Last Days,' 'Carousing Knights Templars,' 'Sebastian Bach and Frederick the Great.'—A nephew, Friedrich (born 1822), and a grand-nephew, Friedrich August (born 1850), also became painters of merit.