[Sigmind]
(b Kassel, Dec 10, 1794; d Kassel, March 7, 1887).
German painter, printmaker, illustrator and writer. After having lessons in drawing from his father, the sculptor and printmaker Johann Christian Ruhl (1764–1842), Ruhl studied from 1806 at the Kassel Kunstakademie. In order to gain a more thorough training in history painting, he spent the winter of 1812–13 studying anatomy at the university at Göttingen and then a year at the Akademie in Dresden.
Ruhl achieved his first successes in Kassel with pictures of horses, as Horse Race in Antiquity (1813; Kassel, Neue Gal.). In 1815, after serving in the Hessian cavalry fighting Napoleon, Ruhl continued his artistic studies in Munich and formed a close association with the painter Carl Philipp Fohr. The two shared an enthusiasm for chivalric romances and undertook joint commissions to illustrate them. Examples by Ruhl include drawings for Ludwig Tieck’s Melusine (c. 1815–16; Kassel, Neue Gal.; Frankfurt am Main, Städel. Kstinst. & Städt. Gal.)....
