I really love this etching by the almost forgotten German Symbolist Alexander Frenz. Frenz seems to have drawn much of his inspiration from myth and fairytale, as in this mysterious scene in which a hooded man summons a tree nymph out of the stump of a blasted tree, with music he is playing on an antique stringed instrument. The etching was first published in Originalradirungen des Künstlerklubs St. Lucas, Düsseldorf, Heft 1 (c.1893). This copy as published by E. A. Seemann, Leipzig, for Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst, N. F. IV, 1893.
Alexander Frenz, IdylleEtching with aquatint, 1893
Alexander Frenz was born in Rheydt in 1861. Frenz studied at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie and Malerschule, and in the atelier of Franz von Lenbach. Like many German artists of his day, Alexander Frenz was profoundly influenced by the Symbolist art of Franz von Stuck. He died in Düsseldorf in 1941.