Rocky Outcropping (recto); Rocky Forest with Strollers (verso)

After studying at the Dresden Academy under Caspar David Friedrich--a leading figure of early German Romanticism--Ernst Ferdinand Oehme traveled to Italy. Yet he later confessed that he was truly inspired by the Germanic landscape, not the Italian one.

Working in detail with graphite, Oehme rendered the abstract, crystalline structure of this rocky formation (somewhere in Germany) and then delicately applied the watercolor. While such outdoor studies were meant to record the impression of color in the fleeting light of transitional moments, they also capture the poetry of the land.