Recent Acquisitions

Carl Wilhelm Kolbe the elder

Kolbe wonderfully captures a sense of awe-inspiring nature in his images of ancient oaks and, as in this work, through a stifling eruption of outsized foliage (grasses, nettles, cattails, enormous and as yet unidentified marsh plants). In The Cow in the Swamp Kolbe dwarfs a peaceful cow with giant marsh plants. Kolbe is at his best in works such as this (perhaps his most sought-after print) in which he depicts the botanical world as an overwhelming force that dominates humans, or mythological figures or animals.

Working in the circles of Salomon Gessner and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kolbe was a critical figure in the complex period of German art between Neoclassism and Romanticism. A Neoclassical reading of this print, for example, would focus on the possibility that the scene could provide a setting for a pastoral idyll; while a Romantic reading would underscore Kolbe’s evocation of the sublime in nature.