After brief studies at the Academy of Arts in his native Leipzig, the landscape painter and caricaturist Karl August Reinhardt led a bohemian life between Dresden, Munich and Hamburg. His wanderings also took him to northern Italy, where he completed his training. He became famous mainly for the cartoons he published in the satirical press during the revolutionary year of 1848. In Munich he published in the Fliegende Blätter, together with Franz von Pocci and the painter Carl Spitzweg, and also in the Münchener Bilderbogen, where he wrote stories on illustrated boards featuring the characters Hanswurst and Kasperl. He returned to Hamburg to found a new satirical magazine and contributed to several other magazines, including the famous Berlin weekly Kladderadatsch. Plagued by gout, he returned to Dresden in 1860, where he continued his work as an illustrator, but also tried his hand at writing a number of comedies and novels. A few months before his death in 1877, he opened the Zum Calculator inn in Radebeul, Saxony, where he had finally settled.