Code: 10190
Dimensions:
AUGUSTIN HIRSCHVOGEL Nuremberg 1503 – 1553 Vienna
River Landscape with Five Bare Fir Trees in the Foreground.
Etching; 1549. Inspired by a drawing by Wolf Huber. Bartsch 60. Hollstein 34. Schwarz 60.
From the collection of Albert W. Scholle, New York (1860-1917), Lugt 2923a.
An extremely fine impression, sharp and black, all the fine lines printing with great clarity. In very good condition; some cockling visible recto and the reverse with some slight skinning, trimmed to the border, and fractionally within in places. This subject is extremely rare, even more so than most of the master’s landscape etchings. Schwarz cited six impressions; Bamberg, with large margins, Berlin, Frankfurt (Stadel), Munich, Vienna (Albertina) and Vienna (Hofbibliotek).
Hirschvogel’s landscapes are arguably the most poetic renderings of such subjects in the first half of the 16th century. Even Dürer’s landscapes, if always connected to other subjects, can be dramatic and picturesque , lack Hirschvogel’s spare but deeply evocative depictions . Linear contours, with only a minimum of shading, in this image define, a foreground screen of bare trees whose thin branches screen a distant and varied landscape. Finally, it is the contours of Hirschvogel’s forms that create the lyrical silence unmatched in German landscape etchings of the period.
While Hirschvogel is connected to the so-called Danube school, a group of artists, chiefly depicting landscape, among them, Albrecht Altdorfer, Wolf Huber and Hans Lautensack, it is Hirschvogel’s landscape etchings which must be seen as among the most brilliant graphic works of the group. To this point the drawing by Wolf Huber, cited by Schwarz, in Budapest (inv. 210) is, pace Schwarz, more a point of departure rather than a direct copy. Hirschvogel used the basic elements of the composition only, reorganizing the spatial construction substantially by making the five pine trees a screen of delicate forms behind which the middle and rear ground elements of the scene are seen. and changing a vertical image to a broader horizontal rectangle. Huber’s graphic works are confined to woodcut only, and none are in pure landscape.
Sheet: 142 x 168 mm 5 9/16 x 6 9/16 inches
