The age of Goethe, Beethoven, and Kant was also a brilliant period for the visual arts in Germany. This exhibition — culled from the holdings of the Winterstein family of Munich, the world's most comprehensive and important private collection of German drawings and watercolors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — afforded viewers an opportunity to study fine works by forty-nine artists from the greatest period of German drawing.
Consummate draftsmen such as Caspar David Friedrich, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Johann Georg von Dillis, Henry Fuseli, and Adolf Menzel were represented in depth, as were the romanticism of Philipp Otto Runge and his contemporaries and architectural studies by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Leo von Klenze. Among the varied subjects were portraits (especially of artists), landscapes, and the phenomenon of the English garden.
The exhibition, which was organized by the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard and traveled after its Frick venue to the J. Paul Getty Museum, was accompanied by a fully illustrated color catalogue, the most comprehensive publication on the subject available in English. The show was on view in the lower-level temporary exhibition galleries and main-floor cabinet gallery.