Landscape with the Town on a River and the Cottage between Trees (1551): Art, History and Details

Landscape with the Town on a River and the Cottage between Trees (1551) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Hanns Lautensack (German, 1524–1566).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

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.

Object facts

• Title: Landscape with the Town on a River and the Cottage between Trees
• Date: 1551
• Creator attribution: Hanns Lautensack (German, 1524–1566)
• Culture: Germany
• Type: Print
• Technique: etching
• Dimensions: Image: 17 x 23 cm (6 11/16 x 9 1/16 in.); Sheet: 17 x 23 cm (6 11/16 x 9 1/16 in.)
• Collection: PR - Etching
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1938.386

A detail from the museum

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.

Collection credit

Dudley P. Allen Fund

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.