The mountains of the Old and New Worlds compared

The artwork

On the boulder in the foreground, at the bottom, a dedication is engraved, «Dédié à Mr de Humboldt par Mr de Göthe»: these mountains were drawn by Goethe himself, for Alexander von Humboldt. You receive it printed on handmade Amalfi paper, with a handmade frame.

In 1807 Humboldt dedicated the German edition of his essay on plant geography to Goethe. The plate that was supposed to accompany it, the great profile of the Andes, had not yet arrived in Weimar, and Goethe made one himself, partly for fun and partly in earnest, dedicating it to Humboldt: to the left the mountains of the Old World, to the right those of the New. On Chimborazo he placed a little man, Humboldt himself, at the altitude he had reached with Bonpland on June 23, 1802. And higher than any peak, to the left, he made the balloon fly with which Gay-Lussac had ascended over Paris on September 16, 1804, to about seven thousand meters.

In 1813 Friedrich Justin Bertuch published the drawing in Weimar in his Allgemeine Geographische Ephemeriden, and that same year in Paris this French engraved and colored copy was released, «Esquisse des principales hauteurs des deux continens». According to the note at the bottom, it is taken from the forty-first volume of the Ephemerides, with the addition of some important places. The copy comes from an atlas of the Géographie mathématique, physique et politique by Edme Mentelle and Conrad Malte-Brun, now in the David Rumsey Map Collection.

Hanging above the desk of someone who goes to the mountains, or in the bookcase of someone who has Goethe on their bedside table, it is a gift that you look at for a long time. And on the boulder in the foreground Goethe continues to dedicate his mountains to Humboldt.

Material of unique quality

Print on handmade Amalfi paper
Sheet size: 40 x 60 cm
With frame: 42 x 62 cm
Material: artwork printed on the finest paper with deckled edges, handmade Amalfi paper
Frame: dark brown with gold fillet, handmade, with glass