Art and designאדמונד פירסט

Edmund Fürst

Edmund Fürst was a German-Israeli painter and illustrator who worked for the Ullstein publishing house in Berlin and later painted landscapes of the Land of Israel.

1874 to 1955Illustration for Ullstein publishersImpressionist watercolor landscapesPaintings of Safed and Jerusalem

Born: 6 January 1874, Berlin
Died: 19 June 1955, Tel Aviv
Occupation: illustrator, painter, etcher

Edmund Fürst was born in 1874 in Berlin

Edmund Fürst was born in Berlin in 1874. His father, Gustav Gerson Fürst, studied art in Paris and became an artist in Berlin. The family came originally from Hungary and settled in Frankfurt an der Oder.

He studied at the Berlin Academy of Arts for 4 years. There he became friends with Lyonel Feininger, who later married his sister Clara. In 1904 he showed an oil painting at the Berlin Secession.

He worked as an illustrator for the Ullstein publishing house, drawing for books and for the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. During the Weimar years he traveled across Europe and painted in oil and watercolor. In 1922 he left an estate near Würzburg and returned to Berlin, where he headed the retouching workshop at Ullstein.

After the Nazis came to power, he was dismissed from Ullstein as a Jew. In the spring of 1934 he emigrated to the Land of Israel with his wife, and held an exhibition in Jerusalem that fall. He painted watercolors of the Sea of Galilee, Safed and Jerusalem, and died in 1955.