Twee Ethiopiërs

About this artwork

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Art Historical Context

Created around 1486–1488, *Twee Ethiopiërs* (*Two Ethiopians*) is a small woodcut on paper by the Dutch artist Erhard Reuwich. Measuring just 84 by 117 millimetres, the print was almost certainly made for Bernhard von Breydenbach’s *Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam*, the first illustrated travel book to be printed in Europe. Reuwich accompanied the author on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and produced the woodcuts that brought distant places and peoples to European readers for the first time. The image offers one of the earliest printed European depictions of Ethiopian Christians, who were then making the long journey to Jerusalem. Its modest size and crisp line work reflect both the technical limits and the expressive possibilities of the woodcut medium in the incunabula period. Through economical yet lively carving, Reuwich conveyed the travellers’ distinctive dress and features, satisfying contemporary curiosity while marking an important step in the development of ethnographic illustration. Today the print survives as a modest yet vivid document of late-medieval encounters between cultures, preserved in museum collections as evidence of how printed images began to shape European ideas of the wider world.

About the Artist

Erhard Reuwich · 1425–1503

Erhard Reuwich (ca. 1445–ca. 1500) was a pioneering German artist and printmaker whose illustrations for the first printed travel book revolutionized European book illustration. Coming from a family of painters in Utrecht, with his father likely being Hildebrand Reuwich, Dean of the painters' guild in 1470, Erhard represented a new generation of artists who recognized printing's transformative pot...