Aurora (Landscape at Dawn)

Description

Gallery Rotations Winter 2014
Hendrik Goudt
Netherlands, 1585–1630
Aurora (Landscape at Dawn)
1613
Engraving and etching
The Paul Leroy Grigaut Memorial Collection, 1969/2.154
Like Daubigny’s print (adjacent), Goudt’s depicts a landscape gradually emerging from the darkness, the light of day revealing its form as night steadily dissipates. But while Daubigny highlights the toils of man in the center foreground of the composition, Goudt’s small but dramatic engraving focuses on the landscape itself, blending naturalism and fantasy through descriptiveness and strong light effects.
This engraving is one of only seven that the artist, an important Dutch printmaker, completed during his career. Trained initially in his hometown of The Hague, Goudt traveled to Rome in 1604 where he began to study designs by Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610), a German artist who worked in Rome and specialized in small oil paintings on copper.