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Following the Government announcement yesterday, museums and galleries in Cambridge will be closed to the public as part of a period of national/local restrictions. So, with great sadness, we will not be able to reopen as planned on 2 January 2021.
Salomon Gessner (1730–88) was a Swiss artist and writer whose idyllic poetry and prose made him a household name in his lifetime. After his death his family invited a German printmaker, Carl Wilhelm Kolbe (1759–1835), to produce prints after a set of Gessner’s landscape drawings, which capture the Romantic period’s preoccupation with the pastoral idyll and delight in the natural world. This exhibition showcases a recently acquired complete set of Kolbe’s twenty-five etchings, issued in five parts from 1805 to 1811, together with a selection of works by eminent masters from whom Gessner drew inspiration, including Anthonie Waterloo, Allart van Everdingen and Claude Lorrain.
