View of Szczecin from lodge gardens

Graphics from the first half of the 19th century with views of Szczecin were characterised by accuracy and attention to detail. Moreover, their authors commenced to showing fragments of the city that had not been presented before. Such works were placed in increasingly popular national and geographical publications, in which graphics with single shots of the city panorama started to appear from the beginning of the 1840s. These included a steel engraving published in 1841 in the series Das malerische und romantische Deutschland. Die Veduten des Reisewerks aus den Jahren 1836-1841, made by Henry Winkles (1801-1860) after a drawing by Bernhard Peters (1817-1866), depicting a view of Szczecin from the gardens of the Masonic lodge. Winkles was an English architectural illustrator, intaglio artist and printer. In 1824, he established the first steel engraving workshop in Germany in Karlsruhe. He notably depicted illustrations of the churches of England and Wales. Peters was a draughtsman and landscape painter from Mecklenburg, associated with the town of Anklam, where he taught drawing, among others, to the famous Otto Lilienthal, later the pioneer of aviation and gliding. He painted landscapes of Mecklenburg, Alpine scenes and views of Scotland. Today works by this artist are rare. A steel engraving from 1841 shows a garden and a belvedere, a building on a hill with a terrace overlooking the area, belonging to the famous Szczecin Masonic lodge Pod Trzema Cyrklami (Zu Drei Zirkeln). In the early nineteenth century, its members purchased part of the site next to today's Polish Theatre (Swarożyca Street) and built their headquarters there. They transformed the area around it into a park and a resting place open to all Szczecin inhabitants. Winkles and Peters' graphics also featured a new motif, never shown before, that is the smoking chimneys of the sugar refinery in Łasztownia (Lastadie), signifying the industrialisation of the city.

Małgorzata Peszko