The Düsseldorf artist Carl Schorn (1803–1850) lived in Paris and Berlin before moving to Munich in the early 1840s. He first made a name for himself in Berlin, as a painter of historical genre paintings.. For King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia he created The Anabaptists of Münster (1843–45; whereabouts unknown) on a subject taken from German history of the Reformation period. Measuring some 6 by 9 metres, this painting was almost as large as The Flood and provoked controversy when exhibited in several cities throughout Germany. Its style, which struck contemporaries as naturalistic, owed much to the work of the Belgian artists Louis Gallait and Edouard de Biefve, two of whose history paintings toured Germany and Austria from 1842 to 1844 in what was the most widely discussed artistic event of those years.
