Heinrich Leutemann
1824–1905 · German artist and book illustrator
Gottlob Heinrich Leutemann (Leipzig, 1824 – Chemnitz, 1905) was a German artist and book illustrator whose work sits at the crossroads of education and popular ethnography in nineteenth-century Germany. Born in Leipzig, he studied there and began by producing lithographs for instructional posters.
In the 1850s he worked on pictures of animals for a zoological atlas. His best-known book project was Graphic Pictures of Native Life in Distant Lands, illustrating the Typical Races of Mankind (1888), written with the professor A. Kirchoff. Intended as an ethnographic study for older children, it described and illustrated the indigenous peoples of the world, from the Aborigines of Australia to the Japanese.
He also worked on classical themes, including the Battle of the Amazons, the Acropolis at Athens and The astronomer Ptolemy putting up a stone. He is also credited with a well-known painting of the sack of Rome by the Vandals of Genseric in 455. His legacy rests mainly on his educational and ethnographic illustration.