Paul Konewka was born in Greifswald in Germany in 1841. As a child he loved to cut out figures and make silhouettes. He was apprenticed to Carl Steffeck and studied painting and sculpture in the workshop of Adolf and Drake Manzel.
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His first success came with a set of twelve silhouettes in paper for Goethe’s Faust, which he transferred to lithographs for printing. These images were shown in an exhibition in Berlin in 1864 and were published in London in 1871; at least some of them are on this site.
He moved to Stuttgart (Germany) in 1867, and there in 1868 created the work for which he was best known: twenty-four pictures for a German edition of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. These were engraved into woodcuts by Albert Vogel.
Konewka died in Berlin in 1871 from consumption at the age of thirty.
