Gezicht op de Plauschen Grund bij Hegereuter 1778

Carl Gottfried Nestler made this print of the Plauschen Grund near Hegereuter, using etching, sometime in the 18th century. It is a bird's eye view of a small, presumably working, community embedded within a romantic landscape. We see people using the bridge over a small dammed lake. It's an image about the relationship between man and nature, one of the key themes for artists in Europe at this time, as institutions such as the academy taught artists to see the world in terms of established aesthetic categories. Nestler was working in a society still dominated by aristocratic patronage, and works like this, whether consciously or not, were bound to reinforce the status quo. However, the fact that he chose to depict ordinary people as part of the landscape could be seen as a progressive step, prefiguring the social realism of later art movements. As art historians, we use documents of all sorts to better understand how pictures like this function in their specific time and place.