Carl Philipp Fohr came to Rome in 1816. He was, in Dorothea Schlegel's words, ‘very crude and student-like renomistic’, but his outstanding talent for drawing was soon recognised. In June 1818, he drowned in the Tiber, where he was bathing with Carl Barth and Samuel Amsler. He was buried with great sympathy in the cemetery near the Cestius Pyramid. Amsler created the memorial print in the same year based on a drawing by Barth with their two monograms at the bottom left. It is one of the most famous and impressive portraits of artists of the German Romantic period. Goethe, on the other hand, found ‘very many flaws and basically a false manner’ in the sheet.