Description:
portrait
Label Text:
This enigmatic face of a man with mustache and goatee, windswept hair blown downward, and a determined look away from the viewer is a fine example of early nineteenth-century German Romantic portraiture. Johann Jacob Kirchhoff, a German painter, illustrator, and printmaker, created this early lithograph within two decades of Johan Senefelder’s invention of the new printing technique, at the very end of the eighteenth century.
Somewhat obscured by the flowing hair of the sitter, the initials “RW” (reversed through the printing process) stand for Wilhelm (Christoph) Reuter, a painter at the court of Queen Louisa of Prussia. He recognized the value of lithography as much more than a means of reproduction in publishing houses, and advocated for the artistic merits of the new graphic medium. Reuter became the first master printer of lithographs in Berlin. He is credited with a refined method of printing lithographs of his own design as well as those of other artists, including Kirchhoff, his son-in-law.
MW, 2013
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+2012.33 |
