German Romantic Prints and Drawings: From an English Private Collection

The nineteenth-century saw the Napoleonic Wars bring about an end to the traditional art market in Germany, thereby leaving the artists with an opportunity to establish a new identity. Artists such as Schnorr von Carolsfeld and Peter Cornelius retreated to the techniques and values of the Renaissance and medieval periods, when art had been more concerned with simplicity and embodying spiritual values. This stunning book of prints and drawings, taken from an English private collection, explores the German romantic movement and how artists such as Freidrich Overbeck drew on the style of his illustrious predecessors Du rer and Raphael to create celebrated works such as Italia and Germania, which epitomizes the mood of this era. The recently-invented lithography technique features heavily among the most noteworthy examples from this era, as does a new, deeper interest in German landscape. Over one hundred items are reproduced and discussed in this superb selection of German prints and drawings from the years between the abolition of the Holy Roman Empire (1806) and German unification (1871), including the greatest and rarest of German romantic prints, The Four Times of Day by Philipp Otto Runge.