Arbored waters 

Franz Kobell created ‘Arbored Waters’ using pen and brown ink, capturing a serene waterside landscape. Made in Germany, likely around the late 18th or early 19th century, it reflects the growing Romantic sensibility towards nature. This was a period when the educated elite began to value natural landscapes as sources of spiritual renewal, rather than just economic resources. Kobell's work invites us to consider how these values were promoted by institutions like the art academy, where landscape drawing was used to instill values of taste and refinement. We might see this image as participating in a broader cultural dialogue about the relationship between humanity and nature, and how that relationship ought to be imagined. To more fully understand this, we might examine other landscapes from the period, alongside contemporary philosophical and literary texts that also grappled with the idea of nature.