He is known for his genre works, as well as for paintings depicting Norse mythology. Friedrich Wilhelm Heine spent the first forty years of his life in Germany. At the age of fourteen he was a copper and steel engraver's apprentice and later attended the Leipzig and Weimar Academies in Germany, working as a book illustrator and designer from 1861 to 1866. He was a war correspondent and sketch artist with the Prussian Army in Austria and a field artist in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. Because of his reputation as a war artist in Germany, Heine was invited to come to Milwaukee in 1885 to supervise the compositions of the paintings of the American Panorama Company at 628 Wells Street. He was one of about twenty German artists commissioned to paint Storming of Missionary Ridge / Battle of Chattanooga and Battle of Atlanta.