German Drawings and Prints before 1800

The oldest sheets in the Graphic Collection are miniatures from illuminated Psalter manuscripts from around 1300. The earliest pen drawings, woodcuts and copper engravings in the collection date from the 15th century. They are all primarily dedicated to depicting religious themes, but artists like the master E.S. and Martin Schongauer increasingly turn to everyday life.

Albrecht Dürer from Nuremberg is the defining German artist personality of the time around 1500. The Staatsgalerie has an extensive inventory of his woodcuts, copper engravings and etchings. An extremely unusual pen drawing by his student Hans Baldung, showing Adam and Eve as exhausted lovers after the sexual act, is one of the highlights of the collection. A group of remarkable chiaroscuro drawings on colored paper also came from Baldung's workshop. They were once in the so-called “large anthology” that entered the collection before 1843 and was broken up into individual sheets around 1900.

A special focus of the collection is on German art of the 17th century, especially from the artistic centers of Munich and Augsburg. Here you will find a number of graphic masterpieces by Friedrich Sustris, Hans Rottenhammer and Johann Heinrich Schönfeld, among others. Printed works by the Augsburg copper engraver families Custos, Kilian and Küsel are also well represented. The extensive stock of drawings and prints by Daniel Nicolaus Chodowiecki as well as numerous landscape drawings by artists such as Jakob Philipp Hackert, Joseph Anton Koch and Adrian Zingg reflect the high quality of the works from the 18th century in the collection.