View across the Moat towards the Thomasschule and the Thomaskirche in Leipzig (1817): Art, History and Details

View across the Moat towards the Thomasschule and the Thomaskirche in Leipzig (1817) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (German, 1794–1872).

The work and its context

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

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld belonged to the Nazarenes, a group of artists who looked to early Northern Renaissance art for its simplicity and piety. The artist created this drawing during a visit to his native Leipzig en route to join the Nazarenes in Rome. He depicted the city’s distinctive features, including the oldest German language school in Europe (of which he was an alumnus) and a church where Johann Sebastian Bach served as cantor during the 18th century. The artist himself appears in a self-portrait at right in the pair seen at lower left. He juxtaposed loosely sketched landscape with areas of profuse detail, created with a hard and sharpened pencil reinforced with pen and ink.

Object facts

• Title: View across the Moat towards the Thomasschule and the Thomaskirche in Leipzig
• Date: 1817
• Creator attribution: Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (German, 1794–1872)
• Culture: Germany, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: Pen and black ink and graphite on ivory wove paper
• Dimensions: Support: 31 x 38.6 x 0.2 cm (12 3/16 x 15 3/16 x 1/16 in.); Image: 15.7 x 23.8 cm (6 3/16 x 9 3/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - German
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2022.1

A detail from the museum

The landscape in this drawing is seen from the perspective of Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s family home in Leipzig.

Collection credit

Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Deutsche Landscaftskunst, 1750–1850: Zeichnungen und Aquarelle aus der Sammlung Heumann, Chemnitz. Exh. Cat. Breslau: Schlesisches Museum der Bildenden Künste, 1933.
• Zeichenkunst der deutschen Romantik. Exh. Cat. Wiesbaden: Nassauisches Landesmusuem, 1937.
• Göpel, Erhard. “Deutsche Künstler zeichnen in Leipzig.” Leipziger Jahrbuch 14 (1939).

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.