Gabriel von Max

On a recent trip to Seattle, I visited the Frye Art Museum, a beautiful little museum on First Hill.  After a painful up-hill struggle of trying to remember how to drive a stick shift over the steep Seattle landscape, I was confronted with paintings of monkeys and doe-eyed women, the creation of a 19th Century Austrian painter named Gabriel von Max.  Nothing about the paintings particularly struck me and I was beginning to think I'd wasted a trip when I came upon a tiny side room that contained von Max's illustrations for Goethe's Faust.  My trip was not wasted.  While I have not been able to find some of the most amazing etchings online, there are a few that you can check out here.  The internet, of course, doesn't do them justice, so if you ever get the chance to see these in person, you should definitely take advantage of the opportunity.