Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn in 1889 and wanted to be a painter from his early teens. The Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna refused him twice, in 1907 and 1908. For the five years that followed he made a living from watercolour: small views of Vienna landmarks, and later Munich ones, copied from postcards and photographs and sold through an agent to frame dealers, shopkeepers and tourists. In August 1914 he enlisted, and he never took the trade up again.

He later led the Nazi Party, and from January 1933 he ruled Germany as dictator. Germany under his rule started the Second World War in Europe and carried out the Holocaust, in which about six million Jews were murdered. He died by suicide in Berlin on 30 April 1945. What follows covers only the earlier years: the attempt to become an artist, the trade he worked at instead, and the difficulty of telling the surviving pictures apart from the forgeries that outnumber them.

Linz, and the career his father wanted

His father, Alois Hitler, was a customs official who had risen from a poor rural background and intended his son for the same service. Adolf wanted to draw. Alois died in January 1903, when his son was thirteen.

Hitler left the Realschule at Steyr in 1905 without a leaving certificate, an omission that mattered later. He spent the next two years in Linz on his mother Klara's support, drawing, reading and going to the opera, and in September 1907 went to Vienna with a portfolio.

Two rejections at the Vienna Academy, 1907 and 1908

Ian Kershaw's account of the 1907 entrance examination gives the figures. Hitler was one of 113 candidates. Thirty-three were turned away on the portfolios they brought; he was among the eighty admitted to the examination proper, two three-hour sessions in which candidates drew set subjects under time pressure. Twenty-eight were accepted into the school. He was not.

Test drawing unsatisfactory. Few heads.

That note is the examiners' entire recorded reason. The drawings were judged unsatisfactory and they contained too few figures. When Hitler asked the Rector for an explanation, he was told his aptitude was architectural rather than painterly. The Academy's architecture school was closed to him in any case, because entry required the Realschule certificate he had not taken.

His mother died in Linz on 21 December 1907. He moved to Vienna in February 1908 and applied to the Academy again that autumn. The second time he was not admitted to the drawing test at all; the register records only that he was refused.

The Vienna trade, 1909–1913

By the autumn of 1909 the money had run out. He gave up his lodgings, slept rough for a period, and in December entered the municipal homeless shelter at Meidling, where he met Reinhold Hanisch. On 9 February 1910 he registered at the men's home in the Meldemannstrasse in the twentieth district, a large hostel for single working men, and stayed until 24 May 1913.

It was there that painting became a job. Hitler and Hanisch set up a plain arrangement: Hitler painted, Hanisch found buyers, and they split what came in. Working in the hostel's writing room, Hitler produced postcard-sized watercolours of the buildings any visitor to Vienna would recognise: the Parliament, the Karlskirche, the Michaelerplatz.

He copied them. The images came from picture postcards and photographic reproductions rather than from the buildings themselves. This was a copying trade and not original composition: pictures made at a size and on a subject that would sell, turned out steadily and priced for people buying a souvenir or a thing to put in a frame. Almost everything he is known to have painted works this way.

• Format: postcard-sized and small watercolours, with occasional oils, almost always of buildings
• Source images: picture postcards and photographic reproductions, copied rather than drawn on the spot
• Sales: through Hanisch until August 1910, then through other residents of the hostel and directly
• Buyers: frame dealers and glaziers who sold pictures alongside frames, plus tourists and small shops

The partnership ended in August 1910, when Hitler reported Hanisch to the police for selling a view of the Vienna Parliament and keeping the proceeds. He kept selling through others. Two of the steadiest buyers were Jewish dealers in the picture-and-frame trade: Jakob Altenberg, and Samuel Morgenstern, a glazier on the Liechtensteinstrasse who took his watercolours regularly until he left Vienna. Morgenstern was deported and died in the Łódź ghetto in 1943.

Munich, 1913–1914

He left Vienna on 24 May 1913 and reached Munich the next day, renting a room from a tailor, Joseph Popp, at 34 Schleissheimerstrasse on the northern edge of Schwabing. The trade continued without changing. He copied Munich's landmarks from postcards — the Theatinerkirche, the Asamkirche, the Hofbräuhaus, the Alter Hof, the Sendlinger Tor, the Residenz — at a rate of roughly one picture every two or three days, and looked for buyers in bars, cafés and beer halls.

In January 1914 the Austrian authorities traced him for failing to report for military service. He was examined at Salzburg in February and found unfit.

The war, and the end of the trade

In August 1914 he enlisted in the Bavarian army and was posted to the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, serving as a regimental dispatch runner on the Western Front for the rest of the war.

He went on drawing and painting while he served, and dated sheets survive from the years in France and Belgium, among them a watercolour of the ruined monastery at Messines. The business did not resume. He never went back to selling pictures after the war, and made no further attempt to work as a painter.

What the paintings are

Art historians who have examined the surviving watercolours describe conventional architectural views, competently drawn and otherwise unremarkable. Stephan Klingen of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich has called the style that of a moderately ambitious amateur, indistinguishable from a great many similar pictures made at the same time. Birgit Schwarz, who has written on Hitler and art, puts it in comparable terms: he had no distinctive style of his own, and paintings by other artists of the period that look much like his can be found in Vienna antique shops today.

The buildings are the strongest part of any of them. Where figures appear they are small, stiff and awkwardly proportioned, which is the weakness the Academy examiners recorded in 1907.

Most pictures attributed to him are forgeries

Anyone looking at a work attributed to Hitler has to begin with the likelihood that it is not by him. Forgery of these watercolours started while he was alive and has not stopped since.

Hanisch, the man who had sold the originals, forged them too. From around 1930 he produced Vienna views in the manner he knew better than anyone and sold them as genuine; Birgit Schwarz describes him as running a forgery operation in the city. He was arrested in November 1936 and died in custody the following February. By the time Hitler took power in 1933, Schwarz has said, the market was already flooded with fakes. The Nazi Party's archive in Munich set out to buy up and authenticate the genuine works for a catalogue and destroy the rest, and frequently could not tell the difference.

Adolf Hitler: The Unknown Artist, published in 1983 by the American collector Billy F. Price, presents itself as a catalogue raisonné and is still cited as one. It is discredited: it carries misattributions and known forgeries, including work by Konrad Kujau, who faked the Hitler diaries in the same years. Schwarz calls the book catastrophic.

Public sales have continued, and so have seizures. In six weeks of early 2019, German investigators took 66 works out of two auction houses on suspicion of forgery: three watercolours from Auktionshaus Kloss in Berlin on 24 January, and 63 paintings, watercolours and drawings from Auktionshaus Weidler in Nuremberg on 7 February. Five further works in the Nuremberg sale were not seized; they went unsold.

What separates an attributed picture from a documented one is an ownership chain that can be traced back before 1945.