Prints and Drawings
Adam and Eve, 1504
Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471-1528) Engraving on paper
Albrecht Dürer, the most important artist in northern Europe during the Renaissance, brought printmaking to new aesthetic levels, approaching it with a seriousness reserved for painting. A virtuoso engraver, the German artist demonstrated tremendous skill at rendering textures and three-dimensional effects in this print. Here, his classically-inspired, Old Testament figures of Adam and Eve are executed in life-like passages of lines, cross-hatchings, and stipple in a beautiful Edenic landscape at the crucial moment before the two are expelled from Paradise.
Adam and Eve is only one print within the collection of master prints given to Vassar College in 1941 from the family of Felix Warburg. This distinguished collection of prints includes outstanding impressions by Dürer and Rembrandt and several other Old Masters and is studied by students in both large survey classes and small seminars. The largest area within the permanent collection, the Prints and Drawings collection spans the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century. It also contains rare eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century works by Turner, Ruskin, Thomas Sandby, and other British watercolorists and draftsmen that are sought out for research by students and scholars nationally and internationally.