Wilhelm Hecht, printmaker and illustrator, was born on 28 March 1843 in Ansbach, Bavaria. He studied wood engraving in Nuremberg between 1857 and 1859, and furthered his studies in larger studios in Leipzig, Berlin, and Stuttgart before opening his own studio in 1968. He was invited to head the wood engraving department of the Imperial and Royal State Printing Office in Vienna in 1885 and was made professor for wood engraving at what is now the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

Hecht contributed to various newspapers and created illustrations in wood engraving for Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Goethe’s Faust, Schiller’s Song of the Bell, and for Heinrich von Kleist’s The Broken Jug. Through the Society for Reproducing Art in Vienna, Hecht was assigned to produce woodcuts of several paintings in the Schack Gallery in Munich.

After he retired, Hecht lived in Graz, then in Munich and Linz. William Hecht died in Linz in March 1920.