Best known as a Romantic painter of exotic scenes and battles, Schreyer is also considered by many German art historians as an important forerunner of Realism and Impressionism in that country. Born in Frankfurt, Schreyer first studied at the Städel Institute there. His teacher was Jakob Becker (1810 -1872), himself a noted painter of landscapes and genre works who had trained in Düsseldorf. It was probably at Becker's urging that Schreyer soon moved to the more progressive academy in Düsseldorf, which at that time attracted artists from all over Europe and the United States. After a period of study at the Academy, Schreyer began his Wanderjahre, which took him throughout Europe during the political ferment of the late 1840s and early 1850s.

By 1854, Schreyer was in the Crimean Peninsula, observing and illustrating scenes of the war that had broken out there between Russia and a coalition consisting of Great Britain, France, and Turkey. At the conclusion of the war, immortalized in Tennyson's poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade," the artist visited Syria and North Africa where he found the exotic subject matter that became central to many of his later paintings. Settling in Paris in 1862, the artist very soon developed his mature style, reflecting the dominance of such French artists as Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) and Eugene Fromentin (1820-1876).

Schreyer left Paris in 1870 due to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, and returned to Germany where he settled in Cronberg, a summer resort and artists' colony in the Taunus Mountains outside Frankfurt, actively painting until his death in 1899. The artist was widely recognized and honored during his lifetime, being awarded medals for his paintings at Paris in 1864, 1865 and 1867, and at Munich in 1876.