Rathskeller Neubau, Halle (Saale), Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, Second Floor Plan

Peter Joseph Weber · c. 1887

Medium

Graphite, ink, watercolor, and tempera on paper

Original size

61 × 84 cm (24 × 33 1/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Realism

A meticulous architectural vision rendered in graphite, ink, watercolor, and tempera, this second-floor plan for Halle's Rathskeller Neubau reveals how German architects of the 1880s elevated technical drawing into an art form in its own right. Peter Joseph Weber worked within the Historicist tradition that shaped German civic architecture throughout the latter nineteenth century, when public buildings were expected to project cultural authority through grandeur of form. His layering of media is deliberate and skilled: pencil construction lines sit beneath crisp ink drafting, finished with transparent washes of watercolor and opaque passages of tempera that give the plan an almost cartographic luminosity. The resulting sheet functions simultaneously as a working document and a carefully composed image — a duality that defines the best architectural presentation drawings of the period. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this work within its architectural drawing collection, one of the most important repositories of such material in the world. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates Weber's precise linework and delicate washes into a richly layered canvas, capturing the interplay of draftsmanship and colour that gives the original its quiet authority.