Object Description
Per Curator, Joachim Homann 3/17/2014 (From C.G. Boerner’s catalog:):
A brilliant impression on a full sheet of paper with deckled edges.
This monumental etching assembles all the important elements of Kolbe’s art: male nudes as repoussoir figures, cattle as staffage, the imposing oak trees in the center of the composition, and the large-leafed plants that become the sole subjects of his famous Kräuterstücke.
Kolbe the Elder trained at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin under Asmus Jakob Carstens from 1789. In 1795 he returned to Dessau where he had once taught and in 1798 was appointed court engraver and professor of drawing and French language at the Hauptschule. Kolbe was chiefly interested in landscape. But while his work was inspired to some degree by that of such seventeenth-century Dutch artists as Antonie Waterloo and Jacob van Ruisdael, his etchings stand ultimately as thoroughly unique creations of the period around 1800. In many of these, oak trees are the predominant motifs, evoking (depending on the different figures depicted within these landscapes) either ideal Arcadian idylls or a more contemporary scenery. #31004 $6,500
