River Landscape with Five Bare Spruce Trees in the Foreground (1549): Art, History and Details

River Landscape with Five Bare Spruce Trees in the Foreground (1549) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Augustin Hirschvogel (German, 1503–1553).

The work and its context

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

Within a decade, Augustin Hirschvogel and Hanns Lautensack were aware of the landscapes by Wolfgang Huber and Albrecht Altdorfer and began to expand their artistic vocabulary. Hirschvogel probably made this group of etchings after traveling down the Danube from Nuremberg, through Regensburg and Passau, to his residence in Vienna. The many buildings, cultivated fields, and roads emphasize human activity and its mark on the landscape but always in the service of articulating a particular topography. Hirschvogel’s etchings found an international audience, informing the development of the landscape genre as far away as Italy and the Netherlands.

Object facts

• Title: River Landscape with Five Bare Spruce Trees in the Foreground
• Date: 1549
• Creator attribution: Augustin Hirschvogel (German, 1503–1553)
• Culture: Germany
• Type: Print
• Technique: etching
• Dimensions: Platemark: 14.5 x 17.3 cm (5 11/16 x 6 13/16 in.); Sheet: 14.9 x 17.7 cm (5 7/8 x 6 15/16 in.)
• Collection: PR - Etching
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1951.491

A detail from the museum

An early adopter of etching, Augustin Hirschvogel was among the first artists in Germany to use a copper, rather than iron, etching plate.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1969. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.

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.