At around 1826, the artists of the Düsseldorfer Malerschule (Düsseldorf School of Painting), especially Johann Wilhelm Schirmer and his mentor Carl Friedrich Lessing, discovered the Neander valley as an inspiration for their works, but also as a location for their "spring festivals" in the Neander cave.

Schirmer took care of the newly founded class of landscape painting in the Düsseldorf Academy from 1832 onwards. He schooled his students' eye for nature by letting them draw highly detailed sketches. The emerging landscape paintings – beside the genre paintings –rapidly became the forte of the Düsseldorfer Malerschule

The gorge of the roaring Düssel with its harsh rocky outcrops and lush vegetation, nowadays long gone, deeply impressed the painters. Apart from some travel reports, their sketches, drawings, and paintings, are the only testimony remaining of the former Neander valley.