Otto von Kameke was already a Hauptmann, a captain, in the Prussian army when he resigned his commission in 1860 to become a painter, an unusual mid-career change that took him first to Rome for two years of independent study and then to the Grand-Ducal Saxon Art School in Weimar. Born in 1826 in Stolp, in Pomerania, into an old aristocratic family, he came from a line of military squires, and had married the daughter of a fellow Prussian officer the year before his change of direction. At Weimar his teachers included Arnold Böcklin and, later, Stanislaus von Kalckreuth, whose landscape work proved the most lasting influence on Kameke's own developing style.
Kameke went on to favour the high mountain regions of Upper Bavaria and, particularly, the Swiss Alps as his principal subject, exhibiting regularly at major exhibitions across Germany and Austria from 1864 onward. He settled first in Dresden before moving definitively to Berlin in 1875, where he was appointed professor in 1889, by which time his reputation as a specialist mountain landscapist was well established; his work entered public collections including the Nationalgalerie Berlin, and museums in Dresden, Braunschweig and Leipzig. He died in Berlin in 1899.
John Mitchell Fine Paintings holds Kameke's view of climbers on the Rhône Glacier below the Furkapass, a subject that places him alongside Konrad Dielitz and Johann Martin Steiger among the gallery's group of nineteenth-century German-trained painters who turned, in the wake of Alexandre Calame and the Geneva school, to the Swiss Alps as serious painterly territory in their own right, distinct from the more Italianate mountain views favoured by an earlier generation.