Group of trees 

Franz Kobell made this drawing of a group of trees with pen and brown ink. It is now held at the Städel Museum. Kobell was a landscape artist working in Germany at a time when printed images were becoming more widely available. His drawings responded to a growing appetite for picturesque views of the natural world and you can almost imagine these sketches being turned into etchings and sold to wealthy tourists. Interestingly, these kinds of landscape images also offered a means to study and document the natural world through a scientific lens. The late 18th and early 19th centuries were a time of growing specialization in science and the establishment of the modern research university. The rise of landscape art is surely connected to these new ways of seeing the world. As art historians, we consult archives, letters and printed ephemera to understand the institutional and social context of works such as this one. By understanding its historical context, we can see how this image reflects broader cultural trends.