Gebirgslandschaft mit Gewässer 

Franz Kobell created this landscape drawing with watercolor and pen in the late 18th or early 19th century. Kobell, who served as court painter in Mannheim and Munich, invites us into a romanticized vision of nature. Look closely and you'll see two figures, dwarfed by the scale of the mountains and the lake. Encounters with nature during this time were often framed by the philosophy of the sublime. The sublime was thought of as an experience that evokes a sense of awe mixed with terror. The Romantics believed that it was only through nature that one could experience a connection to something larger than oneself. The soft washes of gray and brown create a serene, almost dreamlike quality. What kind of emotions does this landscape evoke in you? Does it inspire a sense of peace, or perhaps a feeling of insignificance in the face of nature's grandeur? This piece reflects the changing attitudes towards the natural world at a time when industrialization began to transform the landscape irrevocably.