Goethe’s Female Characters from the Original Drawings of William Kaulbach

The most admired of German painters has given the world his pictorial conception of the women drawn by the greatest of German poets: Kaulbach has undertaken to illustrate Goethe. The painter who attempts to illustrate the familiar writings of a poet is under very peculiar disadvantages, which do not affect the painter who chooses less familiar subjects. Very few readers have the pictorial imagination in sufficient activity to translate the verbal symbols of the poet into corresponding images, and see, as he sees, with vivid clearness both the persons and the objects presented in his verse. This volume illustrates the penultimate melding of art and poetry.