The Anglo-Ethiopian Society
Exhibition - The Sketchbook of Eduard Zander (1813-1868). Views of Northern Ethiopia
From Tuesday 21st April 2009 to Friday 31st July 2009
Exhibition held at the German Historical Institute, 17 Bloomsbury Square, London, WC1A 2NJ.
Curator: Dr. Dorothea McEwan
Opening times: 10:00am to 5:00pm, Monday to Friday with late night opening on Thursdays to 8:00pm .
Eduard Zander, born in 1813 in Gröbzig, Germany, learned about the German naturalist Georg Wilhelm Schimper in 1834, when Zander moved to Munich to train as painter. Schimper had been on botanical collecting expeditions in North Africa and he had gone to Ethiopia in 1837. Zander decided to join him and arrived in Adua, Tigray in December 1847. Together they went collecting plant specimens in the Semien Mountains and, in addition to his work, Zander found time to draw and to paint.
His drawings of landscapes and people are characterised by clarity of form and economic use of line. The documentary dimension of the naturalistic approach in Zander’s work is emphasised through a total absence of passages of light and shade.
The 29 drawings presented in the exhibition are from the sketchbook of Eduard Zander, kept in the British Museum, London, and from the Zander collection in the “Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie” and from the “Stadtarchiv”, both in Dessau, Germany.
More information can be found on the German Historical Institute website.