The Upper Castle viewed from the Park

This lithograph, a good 20 cm high and 30 cm wide, shows the north-west façade of the Bishop’s House in the Upper Castle, as well as the tower with the ‘Welscher dome’. In the centre of the picture to the right, the gate building can be seen in the background. A stately broad-leafed tree, its crown nearly as tall as the tower depicted, lines the path around the castle. Trained in Cologne and Berlin, the Siegen artist Carmen Klein is known above all for her flower watercolours and her lithographs of the city of Siegen, even though her overall work covers a notably wider range of techniques: pen and ink, pencil and charcoal drawings, woodcuts and etchings. The picture shown here is part of a series of Siegen lithographs that were created around 1930 and that show places and squares in the old town and the modern-day upper town. The chalk lithographs were produced using the transfer printing process. In this, the artist first drew with greasy chalk on coated paper, before transferring the motif to a lithographic stone. This procedure has the advantage, among others, of allowing the drawing to be made on the correct side.