Mauritius August Seidel was born on October 5, 1820, as the third son of Friedrich Jakob Seidl, a royal general postal administration auditor, who was in his second marriage to Eleonore, née Büchsenschütz. He received his first systematic drawing instruction at the age of ten at the “Latin School” from the royal drawing teacher Franz Xaver Kleiber, who continued to teach him until 1836 at the Royal Old Gymnasium (later the Wilhelmsgymnasium). On November 2, 1836, August Seidel enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he is documented until 1838. In the same year, he joined the Munich Art Association, exhibited his first painting, and achieved early success: the jury, under Carl Rottmann, purchased Seidel’s debut work for 110 gulden for a lottery in February 1839. The years leading up to his journey to Tyrol and Northern Italy with Friedrich Voltz (1845) can likely still be considered an extended period of training. Presumably until the mid-1840s, and perhaps even longer, Seidel and other artists of his generation associated with the Zimmermann brothers, who, centered around their eldest, Albert, operated a kind of “open-air academy” for landscape painters around Polling and Eberfing. This artists’ colony, the inspiration he gained there, and the connections he formed had a lasting influence on Seidel’s development.