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Cultivated Medlar (Mespilus germanica)
Gerard van Spaendonck (Dutch, 1746–1822)
c. 1800
- Medium
- stipple and roulette
- Classification
- Culture
- Netherlands, late 18th-early 19th Century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Prints
- Credit line
- Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland, for the Donald Gray Memorial Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
The brown and blue-green inks were printed à la poupée. Instead of making a plate for each color, a single plate is selectively inked in different colors using stumps of rags, known as dolls (poupée in French), so that the complete design is printed at one time. Since this process is laborious, the plate was most often colored by hand with watercolor, like the right-hand impression. The printed color, however, creates a more beautiful effect, because all of the subtleties of the shading are evident. In comparison, the watercolor camouflages some of the finest detail.
