Art Institute of Chicago

Feeding Mule - Front, from Die Zweite Thierfolge

Johann Christian Reinhart

Date

1800

Medium

Etching in black on ivory laid paper

Culture

Germany

Department

Prints and Drawings

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

One of Reinhart’s rare departures from a lifelong focus on landscapes, this realistic pair of etchings (2013.439–440) depicts two views of a single mule standing in the Italian countryside. The mule’s dual positioning possibly alludes to Renaissance-era studies of the female nude. Thus the mule becomes not just a prop in a landscape, but the artwork’s protagonist, a carefully studied figure atop a familiarly bucolic ground.

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