Subterranean Jail for the Stage
Medium
etching and aquatint
Dimensions
image: 40.9 × 56.6 cm · sheet: 54.2 × 71.2 cm
Classification
Department
Prints
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Credit
John L. Severance Fund
Accession Number
2003.23
Rights
Public Domain
Tags
male
About this artwork
Trained as an architect, Abel Schlicht also designed stage sets for the Mannheim National Theater. An important forum for German cultural identity, the theater was one of the first companies to produce exclusively German-language plays, including those by beloved playwright Friedrich Schiller. Prisons were an especially popular drama subject in the 1700s, and sets would have featured in multiple productions. Here, Schlicht employed aquatint to render the gloomy space of one of his prison scenes....