Carl Johann Haag was born on 20 April 1820 at Erlangen in the Kingdom of Bavaria. He was the son of Christoph Wilhelm Haag and Barbara Weber. From 1834 he studied with his uncle, a porcelain painter in Nuremberg. He attended school there and began producing book illustrations. He was educated at the Academies of Nuremberg and Munich. He then established a local reputation as an illustrator and a painter in oils, of portraits and architectural subjects. He liked the purity and permanence of watercolour and found it a good medium in which to produce landscape and figures. He travelled to London in 1847 to study English techniques of watercolour painting and evolved a method he claimed achieved the ‘brilliancy of oil painting, combined with the tender-sweetness of water-colours’. He then gave up painting in oils completely and devoted himself to water colour, entering the Royal Academy Schools in 1848. Haag travelled extensively and it was on one of his painting expeditions to the Tyrol in 1852 that he was discovered sketching by Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Emich, Prince of Leiningen (Queen Victoria’s half-brother) and Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (Prince Albert’s brother), who were much impressed by his work. They jointly commissioned him to paint them in an Alpine setting as a Christmas present for Queen Victoria. Her Majesty subsequently invited Haag to stay at Balmoral, where in September and October 1853, he produced sketches that served as the basis for a pair of exhibition-size watercolours, Morning in the Highlands (The Ascent of Lochnagar), given by Prince Albert to Victoria for Christmas 1853, and Evening at Balmoral, a depiction of Albert showing to Victoria the stags shot that day, given by the Queen to Albert for his birthday on 26 August 1854. The Royal Family gathered in the Iron Ballroom at Balmoral on 27 September 1853 to observe Haag make a study of a stag strapped to a pony. The result, John Mackenzie with a dead stag on a pony (1853) may be found in the Royal Collection. There are 30 watercolour studies in the Royal Collection at Windsor for Morning in the Highlands and Evening at Balmoral, all from an old portfolio entitled Original Studies from Nature in the Highlands and presumably acquired during Victoria’s reign. Most are executed in Haag’s broad and free watercolour technique, often with little or no pencil underdrawing. Haag was elected Associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1850 and Member in 1853. In the autumn of 1858, Haag made his first visit to Egypt, renting an old house in the Coptic quarter of Cairo with the painter Frederick Goodall. Each morning, they rode out into the surrounding countryside, sketching wherever they went. They crossed the desert to Suez, sleeping in huts that had previously been used to shelter British troops in the Crimea and then served as stations on the overland pilgrim route to Mecca. The pair camped for weeks with Bedouin tribesmen and narrowly escaped stoning, while trying to paint portraits in the busy markets. Both artists were captivated by the beauty of the landscape and the exotic quality of Arab life. In 1859 Haag travelled to the Holy Land and painted at Palmyra. He was the first artist to paint the Dome of The Rock in 1859, at the request of Queen Victoria and did so with the permission of the Pasha of Egypt, under heavily armed guard. In addition, he chronicled the life of the Bedouin throughout five deserts and pioneered several new watercolour techniques as well. Haag returned to London and took out British citizenship. He returned to Balmoral in the summers of 1863, 1864 and 1865, after Albert’s death, but the Queen found him expensive and troublesome over the copyright of his pictures, and did not employ him again. In 1866 he married Ida Juliane Margarethe Luise, only daughter of Generalmajor Wilhelm Anton Büttner and settled in Lyndhurst Road, Hampstead, where he built himself a large Oriental studio. Their happy union would be blessed with three sons and a daughter. The Artists’ Rifles was established on 28 February 1860 as the 38th Middlesex (Artists’) Rifle Volunteer Corps, with its headquarters at Burlington House. Its first commanders were the painters Henry Wyndham Phillips and Frederic Leighton. The unit’s badge featured the heads of the Roman gods Mars and Minerva. Unsurprisingly, given the social circles he moved in, Haag would be an early recruit into the ranks. In 1873 he went out again to Egypt. In 1903 he and his wife Ida returned to Germany and took up residence at Rother, Thurm, Oberwesel-am-Rhein, where they both lived to a ripe old age, Ida dying in her 80th year and Haag dying in his 95th year on 17 January 1915. His ashes were scattered in the garden of his house.