View of waterfront in Szczecin

Artists of the second half of the 19th century were eager to immortalise the quays of Łasztownia (Lastadie), a river island where goods were unloaded and loaded onto ships and where granaries were located. These works, depicting an idealised image of the city in its heyday, found their way into tourist publications, which were very popular in the era of mass tourism. A water-coloured view of Szczecin from Łasztownia towards St John's Church, showing quays full of various types of ships, was created between 1878 and 1885 by a French painter, watercolourist and lithographer Hubert Clerget (1818-1899) from Dijon, a disciple of French painter Anatole Devosge (1770-1850). His compositions were characterised by meticulousness, although in the representation of Szczecin Łasztownia he erroneously showed two bridges over the Oder. Clerget's woodcut was made at the engraving workshop of Navellier & Marie sc. in France and was used for a publication issued by the French geographer and cartographer, secretary general of the French Geographical Society, Victor Adolphe Malte-Brun (1816-1889). L'Allemagne illustree was a 5-volume illustrated atlas of Germany published in Paris between 1885 and 1888. Malte-Brun also published an illustrated atlas of France, which included Clerget's illustrations. A black and white woodcut with an identical motif of the view from Szczecin Łasztownia towards the main harbour was made by S. Gugenheim, a German wood engraver and book illustrator who was artistically active in the 1870s. His graphics decorated the didactic publication Spamer's Illustiertes Konversations-Lexicon, Vergleichendes Nachschlagewerk für das deutsche Volk und Orbis pictus für die studierende Jugend, a lexicon for the mass reader, also treated as a school aid, published in 1878 in Leipzig and Berlin by Otto Spamer.

Małgorzata Peszko