20. Carl Wilhelm Kolbe
(1757-1835)
Landscape with a Cowherd near a River with Willows

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Kolbe, Landscape with a Cowherd

Landscape with a Cowherd near a River with Willows

Etching, Martens 162, Jentsch 30 ii/ii, 177 x 263 mm. Fine impression on wove paper with large margins; repaired edge tear far from the platemark. Kolbe was, in many respects, a later, Germanic equivalent of Waterloo, being interested in pure landscape and the forms of plants, rather than the depiction of places or conveyance of atmosphere. But he was far more scientifically accurate and detail conscious than Waterloo, and one is aware here not so much of just trees and plants as of pollard willows and oaks, reeds, burrs and kraut. In some of his plates, the vegetation so out-scales the human participation as to become almost surrealistic, but, for all its precisionist detail, this is one of his more modest images.