Landscape with the Town on a River and the Cottage between Trees

1551

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Dominant colour

Landscape with the Town on a River and the Cottage between Trees is a 1551 by Hanns Lautensack, a Renaissance work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.

Who painted this?: Hanns Lautensack
When & what style?: 1551 · Renaissance
Where can I see it?: Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

You see a quiet German riverbank: a town hugs the water, a cottage hides between trees, and a wide sky stretches above. Lautensack printed this scene from two separate metal plates pressed onto one sheet. Tiny dots speckle the sky—an early etching mistake called “foul biting,” where acid ate through the protective wax. Artists were still figuring out the process, so flaws like this were common. To see how other early printmakers handled the same challenges, look up technique: chiaroscuro.

The story of this work

Overview

In this work, Hanns Lautensack used two etching plates and printed them side by side on one sheet of paper, though the reason for this is not clear. The print also displays a printing error, namely the presence of “foul biting,” small dots in the sky that indicate failure of the acid-resistant ground. Such mistakes, or experimentations, were not unusual in the early decades of the development of the etching medium, when artists were still refining their formulas and procedures. Happily, perhaps, the errors abide well with the naturalistic landscape scene.

Did you know?

The vertical break in the center of this composition indicates where two different plates were used and then printed together on the same sheet of paper.

Read the full account in the museum source.