Edmund Harburger
Edmund Harburger (4 April 1846, Eichstätt – 5 November 1906, Munich) was a German painter and draftsman. Life. His father, Franz Xaver, was a merchant in Mainz, and his mother Elisabeth was the daughter of a flagstone dealer. As a result of this connection, Edmund was apprenticed as a mason; a profession he practiced until 1865. His employer's brother was the animal painter, Johann Erdmann Gottlieb Prestel (1804-1885), who inspired him to become an artist. He began by dabbling in small murals at the local casinos. After six years of apprenticeship, he attended the Polytechnic School in  Munich (precursor of the University of Technology) to study the building trades but, in 1866, he decided to follow his true passion and switched to the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, where he studied under Karl Raupp and Wilhelm von Lindenschmit the Younger. In addition to painting, he was also interested in illustrating and caricatures. In 1872 some of his first wood engravings appeared in a book by Friedrich Lennig, a dialect poet from Mainz. Later, he created political cartoons for "Die Gartenlaube" and, by the time of his death, had contributed over 1,500 humorous drawings to the "Fliegende Blätter