The Gurlitt family saga—one thread among many running throughout this venue—begins with Louis Gurlitt, a prolific landscape painter born in Hamburg in 1812, whose mastery of the genre contributed to the flowering of the Düsseldorf painting school in the 1840s and 1850s. Towards the end of that time, Gurlitt traveled to Greece—still ruled by a German monarch at the time—where he painted these views of the Acropolis, testament to the enduring infatuation of the German intellectual class with a heavily romanticized conception of classical Greek antiquity. Louis Gurlitt was the grandfather of Cornelia and Hildebrand Gurlitt and great-grandfather of the haunted art hoarder Cornelius Gurlitt.