Landscape with the Town on a River and the Cottage between Trees

In this work, Hanns Lautensack used two
etching plates and printed them side by side
on one sheet of paper, though the reason
for this is not clear. The print also displays
a printing error, namely the presence of
“foul biting,” small dots in the sky that
indicate failure of the acid-resistant ground.
Such mistakes, or experimentations, were
not unusual in the early decades of the
development of the etching medium, when
artists were still refining their formulas and
procedures. Happily, perhaps, the errors abide
well with the naturalistic landscape scene.