Wenceslaus Hollar - Deutz and Cologne

Wenceslaus (or Vaclav) Hollar was born in Prague in 1607, at that time the capital of Bohemia. Hollar began sketching miniatures and maps in his youth. He learned the skills of copper engraving and the technique of etching with subtle gradations of tone and texture. In 1627 he left Prague and spent several years traveling around what is now Germany and Holland and Belgium. By 1636 he was in Cologne when Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, was passing through the city en-route to the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna on a diplomatic mission. He invited Hollar to join his party to record the journey in pictures. The group traveled up the Rhine, through war-torn areas of Germany, back through the Lowlands and on to London. Howard lived at Arundel House on the Strand between London and Westminster and close to the royal palace at Whitehall. Arundel was one of the great connoisseurs and collectors of his time, a patron of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyke, both of whom he had attracted to London. Hollar soon began to make drawings of his adopted homeland Hollar worked on drawings for a catalog that Arundel intended to publish. There was a growing number of merchants, gentry, and aristocrats with an interest in purchasing books published by various printers based around or close to St.Paul’s Cathedral. The Earl of Arundel sent much of his collection to Antwerp while he went into exile in Italy, leaving his London home to be trashed by Parliamentary troops. He died in Padua in 1644. Hollar moved with his family across the North Sea to Antwerp. By 1652 the Civil War in England was over and many royalists returned from exile. Soon, Hollar came back to his adopted homeland where he remained for the rest of his life.

In 50 AD, the Romans founded Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (Cologne) on the river Rhine and the city became the provincial capital of Germania Inferior in 85 AD and one of the most important trade and production centers in the Roman Empire until it was occupied by the Franks in 462. By the end of the 12th century, the Archbishop of Cologne was one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Emperor. In 1288, Cologne gained its independence from the archbishops and became a Free City within the Holy Roman Empire. The Free Imperial City of Cologne must not be confused with the Electorate of Cologne which was a state of its own within the Holy Roman Empire. Cologne's location at the intersection of the major trade routes between east and west as well as the south-north was the basis of Cologne's growth. By 1300 the city population exceeded 50,000. Cologne lost its status as a free city when all the territories of the Holy Roman Empire on the left bank of the Rhine were incorporated into the French Republic and Napoleon's Empire. The Cologne Cathedral, started in 1248, abandoned in 1560, was eventually finished in 1880 not just as a place of worship but also as a German national monument celebrating the newly founded German empire and the continuity of the German nation since the Middle Ages. By World War I, Cologne had grown to 700,000 inhabitants. During World War II, the Allies dropped 44,923 tons of bombs on the city, destroying 61% of buildings, causing 20,000 civilian casualties and wiped out the central part of the city. In 1945 architect and urban planner Rudolf Schwarz called Cologne the "world's greatest heap of rubble". The reconstruction lasted until the 1990s.

Set of images depicting various harbors, ports, and piers together with ships, fishing and sailing boats, and all types of haven-like places and views. All large image sets on Picryl.com are made in two steps: First, we picked a set to train AI vision to recognize the feature, and after that, we ran all 25M+ images in our database through an image recognition machine. As usual, all media in the collection belong to the public domain. There is no limitation on the dataset usage - educational, scientific, or commercial.