Arcadian Landscape with Round Temple at the Left and a Sarcophagus between the two Oaks

With encouragement from his aunt’s uncle, the prominent German print artist and graphics connoisseur D. N. Chodowiecki, Carl Wilhelm Kolbe entered the Berlin Academy in 1790. Influenced largely by several famed landscape print artists of the period, Kolbe emerged as a chronicler of nature. His preoccupation with the natural world also stems from his delight in the great oak forests that surround Dessau, his chosen home. The landscape genre of an earthly paradise was immensely popular among German artists of the late 18th century, and in this etching Kolbe represents an idyllic grove with traces of antique motifs in the round classical temple at the left, stone sarcophagus among his beloved oaks at the right, and mythic nymph and satyr family in the foreground. This composition is believed to be from the artist’s ambitious early mature print series called Sheets Mostly Containing Landscapes (Blaetter groesstenteils Landschaftlichen Inhalts). An advertisement from 1796 heralded Koch’s technical and imagistic virtuosity in the execution of these prints: "The correctness with which they are worked, the genius with which the artist has imbued them, the truth with which the foliage is handled…all this will earn him the approval of the connoisseur, and a place of honor beside Waterloo and Gessner, to whose manner he comes closest."