Johann Gottlieb Prestel: The Peasant Singers

Prestel was a painter and engraver, who specialised in reproducing drawings in a newly invented printing technique of aquatint. Together with his wife, Maria Katharina Prestel, also an engraver, they operated a publishing establishment for etchings and aquatints, most often copying paintings or drawings of old masters.

Johann Albrecht Dietzsch came from a large and celebrated family of artists from Nuremberg. He is particularly well-known for his Dutch-style genre scenes and landscapes. The fact that several aquatints can be found in Prestels’ graphic oeuvre, made after Dietzsch’s drawings, indicates the acquaintance of the Prestel and the Dietzsch families.