Jakob Julius Scharvogel

After commercial training and working autodidactically as a ceramist, Scharvogel took up a management position at Villeroy & Boch in Mettlach. This was followed by a period in Leipzig until he moved to Munich in 1897 as a founding member of the Vereinigte Werk­stätten für Kunst im Handwerk (United Workshops for Art in Crafts). There he ran his own workshop before he was commissioned in 1904 to set up a ceramic workshop in Darmstadt. Scharvogel specialised in the development and production of weather-resistant architectural ceramics and terracotta reliefs for garden design. Among his largest commissions were the ceramic elements for Darmstadt’s main railway station, the Sprudelhof in Bad Nauheim, and the Kaiser-Friedrich-Bad in Wiesbaden. Scharvogel returned to Munich in 1913, where he received a teaching position at the Technical University.