Portrait of Carl Philipp Fohr
Samuel Amsler German
After Carl Barth German
Portrait of Carl Philipp Fohr German
Not on view
This print was made to commemorate Fohr, who had drowned while swimming in the Tiber in the presence of his friends Amsler and Barth, the authors of this work. Barth, after whose existing drawing of Fohr the print was made, had encouraged the twenty-two-year-old artist, a weaker swimmer than he, to join him in a dangerous part of the Roman river. The print was created to raise funds to erect a monument in the young artist's memory.
The print was one of the earliest nineteenth-century attempts to revive the engraving technique of the great sixteenth-century German printmaker Albrecht Dürer. Amsler and Barth even adopted Dürer-like monograms to sign their names in the lower left corner of the sheet.
