Episode from Grimm's Fairy Tales n.d.

Harmon Faber produced this etching, "Episode from Grimm's Fairy Tales," sometime in the 19th century. It shows a scene of children in a pasture, with a castle in the background. The image likely illustrates a particular moment from the Brothers Grimm's collection of folk stories. What can we say about the social conditions that made this kind of image possible? In the 19th century, there was a growing interest in folklore and fairy tales, seen as a way to connect with a more authentic, pre-industrial past. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were German academics devoted to recovering the purity of the German language and the "original" stories of the German volk. Faber, in turn, translated the project of the Brothers Grimm into his own visual language of etching, a relatively inexpensive method for widespread production. Art historians consult sources, from folklore collections to exhibition catalogs, to better understand how this image creates meaning through visual codes, cultural references, and historical associations.