HILDEBRAND, ADOLF VON (1847-1921), German sculptor, born in Marburg on Oct. 6, 1847. He studied at the art school in Nuremberg, under K. v. Zumbusch in Munich and under Siemering in Berlin. From 1867-68 he was in Rome, where he met his lifelong friends, Hans von Marees, the painter, and Konrad Fiedler, the writer on art. He returned to Italy in 1874 and settled in the neighbourhood of Florence. In 1897 he built himself a house in Munich. He died there on Jan. I, 1921. His work combined lifelike realism with classic conception of form. He modelled many portrait busts, among which may be men tioned Clara Schumann, Hermann von Helmholtz, Max von Pettenkofer, Wilhelm von Bode, Henriette Hertz. For the market place in Jena he designed the Bismarck fountain (1894) ; for Munich the Wittelsbach fountain (1895) and the Hubertus foun tain (19o7) ; for Strasbourg a fountain with the bronze figure of Father Rhine (1903), the architectural part of which was de stroyed in 1919 and the figure placed in a park; for Meiningen he created a monument of Brahms (1898) and one of the poet Otto Ludvig (1898) ; for Bremen a monument of Bismarck (1910) ; for Nurnberg a monument of Schiller (191I ).
His small book entitled Des Problem der Form (Stuttgart, 1893), in which he analysed the optical laws underlying < the artistic representation of form, exercised a revolutionary influence on art criticism. It was widely read and theorists in art such as C. Fiedler, H. Wolfflin and J. Strzygowski have founded their writings on it.
See A. Heilmeyer, Adolf Hildebrand (Leipzig, 1902) .