Art Institute of Chicago

Vegetable Sheet

Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, the elder

Date

1800/28

Medium

Etching on cream wove paper

Culture

Germany

Department

Prints and Drawings

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Carl Wilhelm Kolbe’s most famous prints may be his loose series of painstakingly detailed studies of foliage, which he called Kräuterblätter . The series title can be translated as Vegetable Sheets or, in a humorous double entendre, Vegetable Leaves , based on the fact that the prints (on leaves, or sheets of paper) themselves show a variety of gigantic leafy plants. This particular etching is one of the smallest in the series. Although this sheet’s plants flourish alone, Kolbe often created a convincing sense of the swampy growths’ primeval grandeur by placing tiny humans nearby, or by submerging large cows into their verdant depths.

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