KOLBE, Carl Wilhelm.

Collection des tableaux en gouache et des dessins de Salomon Gessner gravés à l'eau forte par Guil. Kolbe ...

Zurich, a la libraire de Gessner, 1811. Folio, title with large engraved medallion portrait of Salomon Gessner by Lips, dedication leaf, and 25 plates etched by Kolbe after Gessner; an excellent, clean and crisp copy, with only an occasional faint smattering of foxing in the white margins, with the plates in fine, clear and dark impressions, title-page with tear, restored and backed at time of binding, bound in quarter dark green morocco, and green cloth sides, c. 1840, front cover lettered in gilt, richly gilt spine. The etcher Carl Wilhelm Kolbe (1759-1835) is the artist most readily associated with Arcadian landscape engraving in Germany. He created his own pastoral world, best known through his extraordinary Kräuterblätter (etchings of giant vegetation), produced from 1800. He was greatly admired by his fellow artists, among them Reinhard and Runge, but none of them counted as his followers and he founded no school. He studied at the Academy in Berlin where his teacher Carstens said of him that 'Kolbe has genius, a sick body and a good mind'. He settled in Dessau as a drawing master.'Between 1805-8 Kolbe was given leave of absence from Dessau to work in Zurich on a commission from Gessner's heirs to engrave the unpublished gouaches left by the great man. Gessner had made these in the decades before his death in 1788, and had kept most of them. ... The commission to Kolbe was therefore of great significance as a recognition that he was Gessner's spiritual successor, and was publicly announced in Meusel IV 1805, p. 189. Nine gouaches in other collections were added, and eventually twenty-five prints appeared ... In his autobiography Kolbe recalled these years as the happiest of his life: "I lived in the Gessner household as a member of the family, the artists and collectors there, who formed a convivial closely-knit circle, took me into their collections in the most friendly matter, and treated me with respect and warm-hearted openness" (Lebenslauf, p. 8)' (A. Griffith, German Printmaking in the age of Goethe, British Museum 1994, no. 74)The Gessner gouaches dictated to Kolbe the composition of his etchings, but the interpretation, the detail and the atmosphere of the plates is entirely executed with Kolbe's extraordinary landscape eye. His fascination with the great oak forests of Germany and how they affected him and his art are explained in his autobiography: 'A secret, enclosed woodland teeming with growth and life has always made a stronger impression on me than the richest and farthest-spreading landscape. I feel so alone with myself, so comfortably at home, and so distant from the world and the roaring tumult of mankind. Every dark shadow that here and there a lost sunbeam penetrates, every green thickly-thatched vault that the tall oaks built over me, every lovely thicket that on all sides presses in on me and stretches out its arms sensuously towards me as if it wished to embrace me and wrap itself around me ... All this puts me in a rapturous mood and alights my imagination as if with a magic wand. ... At every secluded pond I seem to hear the whisper of bathing nymphs, and behind every oak trunk the happy sounds of playfull Hamadryads'. Simon Schama in his Landscape & Memory calls Kolbe 'the most startingly original of all German graphic artists of the period'. The plates are roughly in two sizes, measuring 435 x 360 mm. (19 plates) and 325 x 245 mm. (6 plates); all plates are in Martens' final state. U. Martens, Der Zeichner und Radierer Carl Wilhelm Kolbe d. Ä., Berlin 1976, nos. 282-306; RLIN locates only 2 copies in US: Getty and Frick Art Reference Library, and also the Swiss National Library copy; no copy in OCLC; NUC adds the Yale copy.

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• ordernr.: A1242

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