Cleveland Museum of Art

Landscape with the Town on a River and the Cottage between Trees

Hanns Lautensack

Date

1551

Medium

etching

Culture

Germany

Department

Prints

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

In this work, Hanns Lautensack used two etching plates and printed them side by side on one sheet of paper, though the reason for this is not clear. The print also displays a printing error, namely the presence of “foul biting,” small dots in the sky that indicate failure of the acid-resistant ground. Such mistakes, or experimentations, were not unusual in the early decades of the development of the etching medium, when artists were still refining their formulas and procedures. Happily, perhaps, the errors abide well with the naturalistic landscape scene. The vertical break in the center of this composition indicates where two different plates were used and then printed together on the same sheet of paper.

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