Vegetable Sheet

From the Art Institute of Chicago record

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.