The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture

Adolf von Hildebrand (6 October 1847 – 18 January 1921) was a German sculptor.

Hildebrand was born at Marburg, the son of Marburg economics professor Bruno Hildebrand. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg, with Kaspar von Zumbusch at the Munich Academy and with Rudolf Siemering in Berlin. From 1873 he lived in Florence in the St Francesco Monastery, a secularized sixteenth-century monastery.

A friend of Hans von Marées, he designed the architectural setting for the painter's murals in the library of the German Marine Zoological Institute at Naples (1873). He spent a significant amount of time in Munich after 1889, executing a monumental fountain there, the Wittelsbacher Brunnen. He is known for five monumental urban fountains and for the Bismarck monument in Bremen, unveiled in 1910.

Hildebrand worked in a Neo-classical tradition, and set out his artistic theories in his book Das Problem der Form in der Bildenden Kunst ("The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture"), published in 1893.

He died in Munich in 1921.