Hanfstaengl, Franz Seraph

Franz Seraph Hanfstaengl (Bad Tölz, 1st March 1804 - Múnich, 18th April 1877) was a German painter and lithographer. He became the photographer to the Royal Court of Bavaria.

Hanfstaengl was born in a family of commoners. At the recommendation of his teachers in the village where he lived, in 1816 he left for Munich to study drawing with Hermann Josef Mitterer. From 1819 to 1825, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and graduated as a lithographer. He kept up a correspondence with Aloys Senefelder. Hanfstaengl became very popular as a society lithographer in Munich. In 1833, he set up his own workshop in Munich, which he headed until 1868 and to which he later added an art publishing department and a photography studio (1853).

From 1835 until 1852, Hanfstaengl produced nearly 200 lithographic copies of masterpieces from the Dresden Art Gallery and published them in a portfolio. He would later become the photographer of the Royal Household and create portraits of distinguished individuals, including the young King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Otto von Bismarck, and Empress Elisabeth of Austria.

He also inspired his brother-in-law, the Austrian physician, inventor and politician Norbert Pfretzschner Senior, to develop an emulsion for dry plate negatives in 1866. He was the father of Edgar Hanfstaengl and grandfather of Ernst Hanfstaengl.