The Twin Brothers Ludwig and Emil Schulthess

Twins Ludwig and Emil Schulthess are dressed in identical clothing and pose alongside plant specimens and drawing tools. This drawing’s breathtaking technique—the charcoal seemingly blown on the page to produce a near photographic quality—belies its painstaking execution. The drawing is devoted to that which can be seen and observed: the brothers press and draw flowers, documenting the world around them just as Hans Jakob Oeri records them with exacting precision. Oeri’s composition embodies the scientific spirit of the Enlightenment, the 18th-century European intellectual movement that championed reason and observation of nature.