Two Pilgrims with Portable Shrine

Tiberius Dominikus Wocher · n.d.

Medium

Pen and brown ink, with brush and brown wash over graphite, heightened with white gouache, on greenish-gray laid paper

Original size

20.4 × 25.5 cm (8 1/16 × 10 1/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Rococo

"Two Pilgrims with Portable Shrine" presents a quiet moment of devotion with remarkable intimacy — two figures pausing on the road, their portable shrine a small but powerful focal point rendered against delicate layering of brown wash and white gouache. Tiberius Dominikus Wocher was an eighteenth-century Swiss artist whose draftsmanship was unusually refined for its era. Working in pen and brown ink over graphite, then building depth with wash and selective highlights in white gouache on greenish-gray laid paper, he achieved a tonal richness that anticipates the atmospheric sensitivity of Romantic-era illustration. The portable shrine — a devotional object carried by traveling pilgrims — is rendered with enough specificity to suggest Wocher had direct observation of religious practice along the routes of Central Europe. Wocher is best known today for his panoramic painting of the Swiss town of Thun, produced between approximately 1809 and 1814 and considered one of the earliest surviving panoramas in the world. That capacity for patient, detailed observation is evident even in smaller works like this one, now held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates Wocher's layered tonal drawing into the warmth and permanence of oil on canvas, preserving the gentle contrast of light and shadow that gives the original its contemplative character.