Rathskeller Neubau, Halle (Saale), Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, Two Sections

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

This architectural rendering captures the ornate interior ambition of a late nineteenth-century German civic project with the precision and warmth of a working artist who knew exactly what he was building. Peter Joseph Weber produced this drawing around 1887 as a design document for the Rathskeller Neubau in Halle an der Saale — the cellar-level restaurant and gathering space beneath a new civic hall. Working in a combination of graphite, ink, watercolor, and tempera, Weber used the layered media to distinguish structural elements from decorative ones, giving each arch, pillar, and vaulted ceiling its own tonal depth. The two-section composition allows the viewer to read the space almost architecturally, moving through the building as though on a site visit. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this work as part of its architectural drawing collection, where it stands as a record of how seriously German civic culture took the design of even its subterranean spaces. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates Weber's intricate mixed-media draftsmanship into the richer, slower language of oil on canvas — preserving the interplay of light and shadow across those vaulted interiors while giving the composition the material presence it was always reaching toward.