Six Etchings after Drawings by Goethe edited by C.A. Schwerdgeburth (Radirte Blätter nach Handzeichnungen von Goethe herausgeben von C.A. Schwerdgeburth)

The year after the publication in 1821 of this set of six unbound landscape prints, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe commented: "The undertaking of several worthy artists to edit etched plates after my drawings must be welcome to me in more than one sense….With the feeling that these sketches that are now laid before the public cannot entirely overcome their inadequacies themselves, I have added a small poem to each, so that their inner meaning can be perceived, and the viewer might be laudably deceived, as if he saw with his eyes what he feels and thinks, that is a closeness to the state in which the draftsman [Goethe] found himself when he committed his few lines to paper."

Both an artist and a writer, Goethe practiced his drawing constantly and learned to etch in 1767. It was only when in Italy in 1788 that he decided that his future lay in contemplating and studying the visual arts rather than in practicing them. For all his greatness as a poet, Goethe recognized his limited abilities as a draughtsman and considered himself forever the amateur. At the very beginning of his career, however, he also recognized the importance of the interrelationship he felt between the written word and pictorial imagery, commenting: "The numerous subjects which I saw treated by artists awakened the poetic talent in me, and just as one makes an engraving to a poem, so I made poems to the engravings and drawings…and so accustomed myself to consider the arts in combination with each other."