Reproductie van een tekening, voorstellende Herman en Dorothea op een bank onder een boom before 1885

This drawing by an anonymous artist depicts Herman and Dorothea seated on a bench beneath a tree. The image presents an idealised vision of rural life, which gained popularity across Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It seems likely that this artwork illustrates a German poem of the 1790s by Goethe, called 'Hermann and Dorothea'. In the poem, the characters meet during the upheaval of the French Revolution, and their virtues help to heal divisions within the local community. The poem was part of an intellectual movement called Weimar Classicism, which was a conscious turn against both the French Revolution and the aesthetic of Romanticism. The poem was intended to promote civic responsibility and family values. To understand this drawing more fully, one might read the poem it illustrates, as well as the writings of Goethe and his associates. One might also examine the history of nation-building in Germany. The image reminds us that art is always embedded within a specific social and institutional context.