thumb|275px|Illustration from Collection de vues pittoresques de l'Italie
Albert Christoph Dies (175528 December 1822) was a German painter, engraver, and biographer most noted for his biography of Joseph Haydn, although it is now considered sentimental and not entirely accurate. As an artist, he is also not very well-regarded.
As painter
Dies was born in Hanover (baptized 11 February 1755), and began his studies there. For one year he studied in the academy of Düsseldorf, and then he started at the age of twenty with thirty ducats in his pocket for Rome,
Goethe visited him in 1787. The poet, interested in the theory of color, reported in his (), "At the moment I am engaged in something from which I learn a great deal; I have found and sketched a landscape that a clever artist, Dies, colored in my presence; thus eyes and mind grow ever more accustomed to color and harmony."
During the Rome visit, Dies also composed music, though later on he apparently destroyed all that he had written, and none of it survives today. the series of plates known as the Collection de vues pittoresques de l'Italie, published in seventy-two sheets at Nuremberg in 1799.
Compared with another biography written at the same time by Georg August Griesinger, Dies's work is almost certainly less accurate and is more likely to have been sentimentalized and embellished. For instances of probable embellishment, see Mathias Haydn and Haydn and Mozart; for an apparent outright blunder, see Rebecca Schroeter. Dies's translator Vernon Gotwals, comparing Dies to Griesinger, concludes:
<blockquote>It is now clear that for facts about Haydn one will turn first to the Biographische Notizen of Griesinger, but that reliance upon that source alone would deprive Haydn's portrait of many authentic details, mixed inescapably with some imaginary ones. Dies's Biographische Nachrichten is the work of a sentimental artist who fancied himself a "universal man" but whose approach to the problem of biography was that of his time and place.
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Death
In 1787, he accidentally swallowed of lead acetate. He never recovered from the ensuing lead poisoning, which caused the loss of use of one of his hands, and eventually died in Vienna on 28 December 1822.