Waagen was born in
Hamburg, the son of a painter and a nephew and lover of the poet
Ludwig Tieck. Having passed through the college of Hirschberg, Silesia (modern
Jelenia Góra), he volunteered for service in the Napoleonic campaign of 1813–14, and on his return attended the lectures at
Breslau University. He devoted himself to the study of art, which he pursued in the great European galleries, first in Germany, then in the Netherlands and Italy. A pamphlet on the brothers
van Eyck led in 1832 to his appointment to the directorship of the newly founded Berlin Museum (now vastly expanded as the
Berlin State Museums), although his main interest was the paintings in what is now the
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. The result of a journey to
London and
Paris was an important publication in three volumes,
Kunstwerke und Künstler in England und Paris (Berlin, 1837–39), which became the basis for his more important
The Treasures of Art in Great Britain, translated by
Elizabeth Eastlake, (4 vols, London, 1854 and 1857). This remains a significant source for the
provenance of paintings then in English collections. Although Waagen has been criticised for his "amateurish and erratic expertise" by modern standards, his work was regarded as highly authoritative for the following half-century. In 1844, he was appointed professor of art history at
Berlin University, and in 1861 he was called to
St Petersburg as adviser in the arranging and naming of the pictures in the imperial collection. On his return, he published a book on the Hermitage collection (Munich, 1864). Among his other publications are some essays on
Rubens,
Mantegna and
Signorelli;
Kunstwerke und Künstler in Deutschland; and
Die vornehmsten Kunstdenkmäler in Wien. In 1849 Waagen became a corresponding member, living abroad, of the
Royal Institute of the Netherlands. In 1861, he was elected an honorary associate of the
Imperial Academy of Arts in
St Petersburg. == References ==