where it all started
where it all started Published by Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, edited by Holger Birkholz, Petra Kuhlmann-Hodick, Stephanie Buck, Hilke Wagner
104 Scraped, Scored, and Thinned Out Caspar David Friedrich and Transparency Paintings Christiane Lukatis 110 Stony Beach with Anchor and Crescent Moon Yuko Nakama 112 Moonrise over the Sea Petra Kuhlmann-Hodick PLACES 118 Rügen Werner Busch 128 Eldena Petra Kuhlmann-Hodick 132 Travels in Saxony Anke Fröhlich-Schauseil 148 Nature and Industry. Four Views of the Plauenscher Grund Carolin Quermann 156 The Absent Dresden Florian Illies 160 Meissen and the Ruins of Heilig Kreuz Abbey Petra Kuhlmann-Hodick 166 Landscape with Bridge Frank Richter 168 The Walking Tours through the Riesengebirge and the Harz Mountains Dirk Gedlich 174 Bohemian Landscapes Dirk Gedlich OLD MASTERS 190 Caspar David Friedrich and the Old Masters Holger Birkholz 208 “On Saturday We Were in the Gallery as Usual” The Dresden Gemäldegalerie around 1800 Roland Enke 212 Landscape Painting between Poetry and Truth Caspar David Friedrich and Jacob van Ruisdael Johannes Grave CEMETERIES 220 “Here Rests in God Caspar David Friedrich” Cemeteries and Memorials Holger Birkholz RELIGION 230 The Cross and the Philosophy of History Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Religious’ Landscapes Christian Scholl 238 A Perfect Work of Art: The Tetschen Altarpiece Holger Birkholz POLITICS 248 “As Long as We Remain Serfs to Princes” Friedrich’s Political Convictions Holger Birkholz THE PAINTER 22 “Remarks …” On Friedrich’s Works on Paper Petra Kuhlmann-Hodick FEELING 32 Friedrich around 1800 and the Small Mannheim Sketchbook From “Sensibility” to “Feeling” Hans Dickel CAPTURING 46 Observations on Friedrich’s Nature Studies and Preliminary Drawings Petra Kuhlmann-Hodick | Johanna Ziegler 70 Woman’s Bonnet on a Stand Liliane Wiblishauser 72 Clouds Werner Busch 74 Caspar David Friedrich and Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes Werner Busch APPREHENDING 90 Portraits Petra Kuhlmann-Hodick 94 Space and Time in Images The Berlin Seasons Cycle of 1803 Anna Marie Pfäfflin 98 The Weimar Sepias Christoph Orth THE DRAUGHTSMAN 9 Director-General’s Foreword Marion Ackermann 10 Sponsors’ Foreword Ulrich Reuter 11 Sponsors’ Foreword Frank Brinkmann 13 Introduction Stephanie Buck Hilke Wagner
306 Image Holger Birkholz 308 Pictorial Models and their Transformation in Landscape Painting in Dresden Anke Fröhlich-Schauseil 316 Dolmen in Autumn, Belated Reception Piece for the Dresden Art Academy Katrin Bielmeier 320 “In Truth, Our Delight in Flowers Comes Straight from Paradise” Mareike Hennig 326 Georg Friedrich Kersting (1785–1847) Werner Busch 330 Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869) Dirk Gedlich 334 Caroline Bardua (1781–1864) Linda Alpermann 338 Louise Seidler (1786–1866) Linda Alpermann 340 Therese aus dem Winckel (1779–1867) Linda Alpermann 342 August Heinrich (1794–1822) Petra Kuhlmann-Hodick 346 Caspar David Friedrich as a Critic of His Contemporaries Johannes Rössler 354 Works by Caspar David Friedrich in the Correspondence of Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky New Material Marina Schulz THE NETWORKS APPENDIX 388 Biography 392 List of Exhibited Paintings and Drawings 410 Bibliography 424 Index of Names 428 Acknowledgements 429 Photography Credits 430 Editorial Note 431 Colophon 370 Underappreciated or Entirely Forgotten? On the Reception of Caspar David Friedrich’s Art between 1840 and 1890 Christian Scholl 376 “In A Horse-Drawn Coach ...” On the Evacuation and Return of Paintings by Caspar David Friedrich in the Second World War Claudia Maria Müller 380 Hans Joachim Neidhardt Rebuilds the Canon, Renewing Interest in Dresden Romanticism Klara von Lindern THE RECEPTION TREES 258 The Physiognomy of Trees Nina Amstutz COLOUR 266 Airscapes Holger Birkholz 276 Evening Skies Florian Illies ART TECHNOLOGY 280 “Head and Heart and Hand” Technical Findings in the Caspar David Friedrich Paintings at the Albertinum in Dresden Maria Körber 296 The Cemetery The Complete Fragment Kathleen Hohenstein 302 A Technical Reproduction of Caspar David Friedrich’s Sailing Ship of 1815 as a Study Tool Juliane Busch
47 | Detail 8 | Detail “Furnished with pencil and paper / not forgetting the rubber”, we read in two lines of a longer “verse letter” written in circa 1802/1803, which describes Friedrich setting forth to sketch from nature.1 This minimal inventory of equipment seems to have sufficed for most of his forays.2 As a rule, his sketching paper was contained in a bound notebook.3 In her catalogue raisonné, Christina Grummt assigns 404 of the altogether 1014 sheets attributed to Caspar David Friedrich to a total of seventeen different sketchbooks.4 Many of these sheets are double-sided, which indicates that approximately one half of Friedrich’s surviving drawings must have come from sketchbooks. Only six of these have survived in a bound state, while all the others have meanwhile been disbound and the sheets dispersed.5 The Berlin Sketchbook I – the first sketchbook, produced in 1799 during the Dresden period, and no longer in a bound condition – is preserved at the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin. It contains a pencil drawing of the foliage of two pine trees, their open contours indicated by small strokes and hooks in a style familiar from many later drawings. The trees stand “in der Ferne” (in the distance) in relation to the viewer, as Friedrich notates fastidiously alongside each tree trunk (fig. 1). In 1807, we re-encounter the lefthand tree, also on the left and again seen from a distance, at the edge of the painting View over the Elbe Valley (fig. 24, p. 143). Alongside trees, a typical study motif, Friedrich occasionally took up his pencil to record objects from everyday life – in this case three towels hanging from a clothesline, and below them, indicated only with fine contour lines, a drying shirt. Its folds are delineated by loose but clearly placed strokes. Surviving from his boat crossing from Copenhagen in the Copenhagen Sketchbook are three sheets dated 5–7 May 1799. Executed for practice, or simply as a diversion, they depict fellow travellers in various poses: standing, lying down or seated. Similar hatching lines are observable here in the rendering of items of clothing (fig. 1). Contained Petra Kuhlmann-Hodick | Johanna Ziegler OBSERVATIONS ON FRIEDRICH’S NATURE STUDIES AND PRELIMINARY DRAWINGS
The Draughtsman 48 on one sheet of the Berlin Sketchbook I together with a cloud study are a number of small, cursorily executed figures, consisting only of outlines without any modelling (fig. 3). The Berlin Sketchbook II, which dates from the following year, again documents Friedrich’s interest in studies of figures in various poses, which he sketched from Dutch and Flemish paintings in the Dresden 1 Caspar David Friedrich Two Tree Studies, Hanging Laundry Disbound Berlin Sketchbook I c. 1799 | CAT 15 Gemäldegalerie for later use as models for accessory figures (figs. 1, 2, p. 191).6 With the exception of the Small Manheim Sketchbook,7 Friedrich’s sketchbooks are dominated by studies of vegetation, trees, rock formations and landscapes. On 20 April 1799, he sketched a still-leafless tree standing on a hillside (fig. 4). He provides a few hints concerning the surrounding landscape: a small bridge with wooden handrails, and on the upper right, a tall sapling. Using pencil, Friedrich traces the intricate ramifications of the branches, which hang downward above the slope, down to the smallest detail. As indicated by its sinuous outline, the right hand side of the tree, bare of branches, lies in shadow. Friedrich had proceeded similarly two years earlier – then still in Copenhagen – in a study of a leafed-out oak tree (fig. 5). With foliage outlined in jagged lines and its forceful presence heightened through modelling with coarse hatching lines, it otherwise has little in common with the graceful and almost curvaceous branches of the early sheet in the sketchbook from the Dresden period, although it too, as notated by the artist, was executed “after nature in 1797”. Friedrich reworked his pencil studies from nature – for the most part, presumably, in the studio – with pencil or pen and brush, overdrawing them using carbon black or iron-gall ink, and applying washes consisting of diluted pigment or ink and brown-toned watercolours such as ochre or bistre mixtures. Colour samples are found at the margins of a study of a conifer dated 1798, whose contours were essentially omitted and applied later using a brush over the preliminary pencil drawing. They show how Friedrich blended together the almost sepia-like greyish-brown tone from various colours (fig. 6). Here, too, he has inscribed the notation “from nature”. Still perceptible in studies from 1799 from the Berlin Sketchbook I – among them a study of vegetation at the foot of a tree trunk (fig. 7) and a study of a massive, leafy tree near a boulder, executed in pen over pencil without additional internal modelling (fig. 8) – is the influence of contemporary drawing manuals, among them Adrian Zingg’s Anfangsgründe für Landschaftszeichner, on the “Fundamentals of Landscape Drawing”.8 The blackening on the reverse of the hitherto unidentified landscape Stream with a Bridge, also dating from 1799, indicates that it was conceived as the design for an etching (fig. 9). With its only partial application of wash to the cloudy sky, partly unfinished descriptive linework, and
3 Caspar David Friedrich Studies of Figures and Clouds Disbound Berlin Sketchbook I c. 1799 | CAT 20 4 Caspar David Friedrich Tree Studies, Stone Arch Bridge Disbound Berlin Sketchbook I 20 April 1799 | CAT 14 5 Caspar David Friedrich Oak Tree 1797 | CAT 3 6 Caspar David Friedrich Tree Studies September 1798 | CAT 9 7 Caspar David Friedrich Study of Plants and Tree Trunk Disbound Berlin Sketchbook I c. 1799 | CAT 13 8 Caspar David Friedrich Tree Study, Study of a Rock (below) Disbound Berlin Sketchbook I 27 May 1799 | CAT 18 2 Caspar David Friedrich Study of Seated Youth Disbound Copenhagen Sketchbook I 7 May 1798 | CAT 8 3 6 8 5 4 7
The Draughtsman 50 predominant emphasis on contours, this somewhat conventional composition betrays inconsistencies. Quite typical for Friedrich are the rocks set in the water in the foreground, their distinct contours defined using just a few lines. Similar stones are found later in Friedrich’s landscapes of the coastline on Rügen (fig. 18). Friedrich proceeds in a very similar fashion in his studies of rock formations in Saxon Switzerland, with powerful contours retraced with pen and the shadowed areas and elements integrated into the landscape using wash (figs. 10 –13). He does not, however, pursue the possibilities of typical or picturesque arrangements, as in the above-mentioned sheet Stream with a Bridge, instead betraying a pronounced interest in exceptional or particularly striking constellations of motifs. His Rock Studies of 20 May 1799 makes an almost surreal impression (fig. 10); the fantastical rock formations recorded in a sketchbook on 17 August 1799 (fig.12) went on to serve a number of years later as the model for the summit of the mountain in the sepia Cross in the Mountains (fig. 50). They appear again in the ensuing version in oil known as the Tetschen Altarpiece (fig. 1, p. 239), whose mountain peak is modelled on Honigstein in Saxon Switzerland. Clearly, Friedrich repeatedly took up his studies independently of their date of origin, picking out a variety of motifs he would then incorporate into his invented compositions. PAPER Friedrich lived in a time of change – not just socially and politically, but technologically as well. This also applies to the artist’s materials available to him. Tried-and-true materials and implements remained in use for decades, while at the same time new methods and technical innovations were put to the test. A decisive factor alongside the delight in experimentation on the part of artists was the availability of certain materials. Today, we are increasingly gaining better insights into such technological transformations by consulting previously little-regarded historical sources, as well as by exploiting advances in scientific sampling and imaging methods.9 Friedrich explored the potential of new innovations in drawing materials, as well as in technical aids, instructing himself on how best to make use of them through the latest artist manuals and other publications.10 For this reason, his oeuvre reflects the dramatic changes taking place in the development of paper and drawing materials at the turn 10 Caspar David Friedrich Rock Studies Disbound Berlin Sketchbook I 20 May 1799 | CAT 17 11 Caspar David Friedrich Rocky Slope Disbound Berlin Sketchbook I 9 June 1799 | CAT 19 12 Caspar David Friedrich Boulders with Plants in Between Disbound Berlin Sketchbook II 17 August 1799 | CAT 25 13 Caspar David Friedrich Studies of Stones and Rocks, Study of Rocks with a Flight of Steps Disbound Berlin Sketchbook II 2 October 1799 | CAT 26 9 Caspar David Friedrich Stream with a Bridge c. 1799 | CAT 32 10 12 11 13
51 of the 19th century, which can be illustrated, for example, with reference to the paper he used. Well into the 18th century, the only paper available in Europe was laid or handmade paper, recognisable by its ribbed structure and produced using a sieve formed of metal wires. All of Friedrich’s works on paper up until the early Dresden period – including the watercolours produced in Copenhagen in 1797 (figs. 2– 4, pp. 35–37) and the drawings in the early Berlin Sketchbook I and II, dated 1799/1800 – were executed on laid paper. The textured surface structure has a profound impact on the optical impression of works executed on laid paper. This is clearly evident, for example, in the tree studies found in the Berlin Sketchbook II (fig. 14). Through the use of laid paper, the drawing acquires its own grid structure, which has a strong effect in close-up viewing. More importantly, the screen structure of the paper shows through the lines of the drawn limbs and branches, shaping the character of the linework itself. For the generation that preceded Friedrich, these surface characteristics were increasingly perceived as a restriction. The resultant demand for absolutely smooth, fine paper was eventually accommodated by the English papermaker James Whatman, whose innovative wove paper or socalled ‘Vélin’ (as it was called on the continent, in evocation of vellum) was quickly disseminated throughout Europe beginning in the 1780s.11 Paper displaying the characteristic Whatman watermark is found on numerous 19th century works, including a large number by Friedrich.12 Wove first makes its appearance in his oeuvre around 1799. Friedrich required smooth paper in particular for executing portraits, for which he used black chalk with powerful hatching lines and extremely fine modelling for the face.13 The earliest landscape drawings executed on wove paper referenced by Grummt are The Regenstein in the Harz (Clifftop with Wooded Summit) (fig. 7, p. 172) and the drawings of the Large Mannheim Sketchbook of 1799, the earliest sketchbook consisting of wove paper. This sketchbook contains numerous vedute and precisely rendered depictions of architecture from the wider surroundings of Dresden and Saxon Switzerland but also the (no longer surviving) castle ruins of Wolgast near Usedom in formerly Swedish Pomerania (fig. 15).14 Notated here for the first time (alongside a number of abbreviations referring to a legend) are colour notations and information on the impressive thickness of the walls of the destroyed gunpowder tower (“11 Füß dick oben” – 11 feet thick at the top), and, at the entrance to the bridge in the foreground, notations on the proportions of a human figure, and alongside that, the word “Mann”.15 To facilitate later transfer, to an etching plate, for example, Friedrich has delimited the pictorial field and partially blackened the reverse of the drawing. In view of the subsequent development of Friedrich’s drawing style towards fine lines and accurate rendering, it hardly seems surprising that he switched almost entirely to wove paper around 1800. He exploited the new possibilities of this type of paper, visibly adjusting his working manner in relation to them, to the evident benefit of his artistic intentions. In contrast to his drawing paper, Friedrich seems to have been less exacting in choosing writing paper – clearly, far fewer aesthetic demands were made on the latter. As late as 1830 or thereabouts, letters and other texts were still being written on laid paper, often with watermarks of the kind no longer found in contemporaneous drawings. Examples are the watermarks with the Saxon coat of arms on his Äusserungen (“Remarks …”), or the watermark with crossed swords on a letter to Louise Seidler (fig. 1, p. 339).16 Later on, Friedrich used laid paper only in isolated instances, on occasion for architectural designs, for example.17 THE SKETCHBOOKS Although the switch to wove paper was virtually immediate, Friedrich’s technique changed only gradually. As earlier, he generally reworked his 14 Caspar David Friedrich Tree Studies (verso) Disbound Berlin Sketchbook II 7 April 1800 | CAT 28 15 Caspar David Friedrich Ruin on a Dyke (Powder Tower, Castle Ruins of Wolgast) Disbound Large Rügen Sketchbook c. October 1801 | CAT 59
75 14 | Detail Werner Busch CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH AND PIERRE-HENRI DE VALENCIENNES Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, a painter and theorist with a large circle of students, was clearly the most important source of inspiration for Friedrich’s approach to capturing the natural world. In this essay, I will take a closer look at the impact of Valenciennes’s work on Friedrich. First published in year VIII of the Revolutionary Calendar (1799/1800), Valenciennes’s compendious treatise Élémens de perspective pratique, à l’usage des artistes came out in Germany a mere three years later, in a widely circulated two-volume edition with annotations by the translator.1 Two volumes were deemed necessary because Valenciennes’s treatise links two things that do not seem to belong together in any immediately obvious way. The first part, consisting of a good 400 pages, is devoted to perspective, while the second part, 200 pages long, is a practical guide to landscape painting. Art historians have tended to focus almost exclusively on this second part. Understandably so, as it is in this part that Valenciennes extols in some detail and with innovative zeal the purpose and practice of painting oil sketches. A large number of Valenciennes’s oil sketches have come down to us, most of them are now in the collection of the Louvre. Looking at them today, we would not hesitate to describe them as autonomous works of art in their own right. For Valenciennes, however, they were no more than studies – in his ‘official’ landscape paintings, Valenciennes remained committed to the canon of classic academic standards and subjects. His practice of working sur le motif and of painting rapidly executed oil sketches that captured the changing atmospheric conditions was widely adopted, eventually reaching Camille Corot and the artists of the Barbizon School through Valenciennes’s pupils Jean-Victor Bertin and Achille-Etna Michallon. Valenciennes’s theory and practice gave rise to an entire branch of scholarship devoted to oil sketches.2 However, this single-minded focus has rather blinkered scholars to Valenciennes’s numerous observations on new ways of representing nature in the first part of the treatise. In this
The Draughtsman 76 1 Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes Der Rathgeber für Zeichner und Mahler, besonders in dem Fache der Landschaftmahlerey: Nebst einer ausführlichen Anleitung zur Künstlerperspectiv (German edition of Élémens de perspective pratique) | 1803 2 Caspar David Friedrich Boulders and Trees, Farmstead, Ferns | 13, 14, 15 June (1810) Pencil on wove paper, 357 × 260 mm Private collection (G 628) essay I shall attempt to trace the astonishingly far-reaching influence of both parts of the manual on Caspar David Friedrich.3 This is not to say that Friedrich drew on Valenciennes’s treatise to the exclusion of other such texts. Several of the French artist’s precepts can also be found elsewhere, but the sheer number of practical parallels suggests that Friedrich favoured Valenciennes’s textbook. However, we must bear in mind that Friedrich’s command of French may not have been such as to allow him to make the most of the original French version of the treatise of 1799/1800, even though copies of it were available in Dresden. The German edition, published in 1803, would have filled in any gaps (fig. 1). DRAWING FROM NATURE Most of Caspar David Friedrich’s more than 1000 surviving drawings were intended to serve as direct visual records of nature, as studies for further use.4 Many of them feature annotations, abstract marks or symbols, words or brief comments.5 In the vast majority of cases, the way these are used can be traced back to Valenciennes’s recommendations. The most common term in Friedrich’s drawings from 1806/1807 onwards is the word “Horizont”, often accompanied by a horizontal line.6 Moreover, this horizon line, conceived as continuous, is punctuated within the image by a tiny circle labelled “Auge” or “Augpunkt” (eye or eye point) (fig. 2). An English translation of a passage from the German edition of Valenciennes’s treatise would read as follows: “[T]hree lines must be fixed on the picture plane at the outset […]. The first of these lines is the groundline or baseline, which is the lowest line of the painting and runs parallel to the horizon line [Horizont= Linie]. The second is the horizon line, which is always assumed to be at eye level. The third is the vertical line, which is a perpendicular line that divides the painting into two equal parts and intersects the horizon line at a right angle and descends to the baseline. In perspective, the point at which the vertical line meets the horizon line is called the eye point [Augpunkt: 2
77 3 Caspar David Friedrich Willow Struck by Lightning | 19 March 1812 Pencil, wash, watercolour on wove paper, 260 × 355 mm | Prague, Národní galerie, inv. DK 463 (G 660) 4 Caspar David Friedrich Mountain Landscape with Figure (Schmiedeberg Ridge) | 13 July 1810 Pencil, 260 × 360 mm Kunsthalle Mannheim, inv. G 445 (G 622) 5 Caspar David Friedrich Landscape Studies 9–12 May 1808 Dresden Sketchbook of 1807–1812, sheet 10 | CAT 97 (G 564) vanishing point].”7 Looking at Friedrich’s drawings, one wonders what exactly this ground line is supposed to mark. It can be found in his works from an early date and is often accompanied by the word “Vorgrund” (foreground), which also features in the German translation of Valenciennes (fig. 3).8 In Valenciennes’s treatise, it plays an important role because it is from this line that the distance to any buildings the artist wants to depict is measured. The distance, he states, should be three times the width of the buildings, for it is only from this distance that they would appear correct in perspective.9 Friedrich’s use of the ground line is a little different, although he, too, employed it as a marker of distance. It marks the line from which the artist has recorded the various elements/objects in the drawing – which is no different from Valenciennes – but Friedrich used it as the baseline for his system of rendering distances and spatial relationships, which his simple outline drawings could not in themselves convey. A case in point are his views of landscapes bordered in the distance by serried ranks of mountain ranges. While the overlaps of the silhouettes make it clear which mountains are closest to the viewer, they provide no clue to the distance between the individual ranges. Friedrich elucidated their spatial relationship with numbers decreasing from front to back (figs. 4, 5).10 3 4 5
The Draughtsman 78 Whenever the artist went on to use a given drawing as the basis for a painting, these sets of numbers allowed him to render the effects of aerial (or atmospheric) perspective with its loss of colour saturation and definition in the distance – Valenciennes wrote about this in detail.11 The horizon line is in direct relation to the ground line. If the horizon is relatively close to the ground line, the objects are seen from below; if it is particularly high, they are seen from above. In Friedrich’s drawings, the horizon line is not only clearly marked in views of wide open landscapes or the sea12 but also in closely observed views of rocks and studies of trees, most notably in the Oslo Sketchbook of 1807,13 and even in studies of tangled roots.14 Strikingly, these markers of the horizon line can also be found in the most unlikely of places, for example on the lower part of a tree trunk (fig. 6). What should we make of this? For one, we have to imagine Friedrich as sitting on the ground as he drew, and, what’s more, we have to recognise that whenever he translated a drawing into a painting, he consistently retained the perspective and spatial relationships recorded in the drawing. Thus, the horizon in the painting would be the one he had defined in the drawing. It was not uncommon for Friedrich to annotate his drawings not only with the time of day but also with the position of the sun and thus the fall and distribution of light and shadow (figs. 7–9).15 And, if for once he did not indicate the horizon line, he would at least annotate the drawing with the words “unten” or “von unten” to make it clear that he had seen the object from below (fig. 10).16 Friedrich’s reliance on the horizon line even in simple drawings of trees may well have been shored up by an entire paragraph in chapter 8 of the first volume of Valenciennes’s book, which reads to the following effect in English: “The passages of foliage can easily be brought into perspective if one considers that the upper part is seen of those that are below the horizon line, that others which are squarely on the horizon line present neither the upper nor the lower part, and those which are above the horizon line are seen from below. Furthermore, with all trees that are reflected in water, the underside of the leaves is shown, etc.”17 We may find this absolute commitment to nature somewhat excessive, but we should always keep in mind that Friedrich would have considered any deviation from God’s Creation as sacrilegious. But how could he maintain this degree of fidelity to nature and at the same time transcend it in such 6 7
6 Caspar David Friedrich Tree Studies | 1 May–2 June 1809 Pencil, 360 × 259 mm | Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Graphische Sammlung, inv. C 1922/131 (G 584) 7 Caspar David Friedrich Tree Studies and Park Landscape Dresden Sketchbook of 1807–1812, sheet 3 | CAT 97 (G 557) 8 Caspar David Friedrich Tree and Plant Studies Dresden Sketchbook of 1807–1812, sheet 11 14 May 1808 | CAT 97 (G 565) 9 Caspar David Friedrich Study of a Willow, Study of Two Branches 18 April–2 June 1809 | CAT 102 10 Caspar David Friedrich Forest, Krippen Disbound Krippen Sketchbook | 20 July 1813 | CAT 128 8 9 10
133 5 | Detail Anke Fröhlich-Schauseil TRAVELS IN SAXONY When Caspar David Friedrich first hiked through the Elbe Sandstone Mountains around 1800, encountering such landmarks as the Uttewalder Grund gorge, Hohenstein Castle, the Teufelsstein (Devil’s Rock) near Krippen, and Mount Lilienstein, he was by no means the first to do so, and would already have found a certain amount of wanderers’ ‘infrastructure’ to help him on his way. Wanderers, or ‘ramblers’, in search of the picturesque (das Malerische), followed paths that were used by local people and employed local guides. At night, they might have found lodgings with the resident pastor. Indeed clergymen such as Pastor Wilhelm Leberecht Götzinger and Pastor Carl Heinrich Nicolai were also the first compilers of travel guides.1 So-called ‘Saxon Switzerland’ was not the only popular destination. Since the first half of the 18th century, the Meissen area, the Mulde Valley, the Plauenscher Grund gorge near Dresden, the Ore Mountains, the Zittau Mountains, the ‘Giant Mountains’, and Bohemia had all been repeatedly explored by artists bearing sketchbooks, whose drawings then formed the basis for studio works.2 Johann Alexander Thiele, in particular, created large-scale depictions, not only of striking castle- topped crags that dominate the landscape, like Lilienstein, Königstein, Wehlen and Oybin, but also of the Plauenscher Grund.3 In washed graphite and pen-and-ink drawings, for example of Mount Lilienstein and the Königstein fortress, he and his pupils Christian Benjamin Müller and Johann Gottlieb Schön found a style that combined sensibility with factual objectivity. THE PLAUENSCHER GRUND AND THARANDT Like the Elbe Valley, the Plauenscher Grund near Dresden was another destination which attracted Caspar David Friedrich. Thiele had already portrayed it in a series of four vedute made between 1741 and 1747.4 In the 18th century, the gorge still retained an almost arcadian charm, as Johann Christian Klengel’s painting of 17965 and a brush drawing by Heinrich Theodor Wehle6 show.
The Draughtsman 134 Its attractions were drawn to public attention by Wilhelm Gottlieb Becker in his account Der Plauische Grund … (or “The Plauenscher Grund near Dresden with Reference to Natural History and the Art of Landscape Gardening”), published in 1799.7 It was illustrated with copperplates engraved by Johann Adolph Darnstedt after drawings by Klengel.8 Before Plauen, Potschappel and Rabenau became popular, Tharandt, with its medieval castle ruins, was the better-known destination for walkers. The ensemble of ruins, church and houses was depicted by Adrian Zingg9 and Klengel, as well as by etchers and copper engravers like Philipp Veith or Carl August Richter and Johann Friedrich Wizani, who reproduced the motif in prints. Anton Graff, Carl Gustav Carus, Christian Gottlob Hammer, Karl Gottfried Traugott Faber and Ludwig Richter also found motifs for their compositions here. Friedrich depicted the ruins on several occasions (fig. 1), including in a drawing on a sheet 3 Johann Georg Wagner Hilly Landscape with Boulder, Cottages, and Flock of Sheep on the Road Tempera, 203 × 242 mm Vienna, Albertina Museum, Grafische Sammlung, inv. 4752 1 Caspar David Friedrich Castle Ruins in Tharandt, Tree Study 1/2 May 1800 | CAT 40 2 Caspar David Friedrich Ruins, Church and Houses in Tharandt c. 1799 | CAT 21 now in Berlin, where he adopted a viewpoint that Klengel had already selected for a painting – although under different light conditions.10 Friedrich probably knew Klengel’s composition, at least in the form of one of three reproductive prints made after it,11 one of which, a copper engraving, to illustrate the above-mentioned book by Becker.12 In 1799 Friedrich made a pencil drawing of the ruins which he then went over in pen and ink (fig. 2), omitting, however, the tree-dotted slope above the line of the lake shore, which appears in pencil only. In another drawing, meanwhile, he did the opposite, going over the slope in pen and ink, but not the ruins.13 Thus, in each drawing, he concentrated on a different part of an envisaged whole resembling Klengel’s model. Yet Friedrich also depicted the glassworks, the Königsmühle and Neumühle flourmills and the powder mill, modest buildings in the Plauenscher Grund that presaged its transformation into an industrial zone (fig. 7, p.152).14 The composition of these gouaches, showing centre ground and
135 4 Caspar David Friedrich Rock Studies and Detail of a Gothic Church 3 September 1800 (left) Natural Arch in the Uttewalder Grund 28 August 1800 (right) | CAT 43 6 Christian August Günther The Natural Arch in the Uttewalder Grund North of Wehlen in Saxon Switzerland | 1800 Page from Brückner’s Piktoreskische Reisen durch Sachsen, 93 × 61 mm (image); 161 × 101 mm (sheet) Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kupferstich- Kabinett, Inv. A 1995-6773 5 Caspar David Friedrich Natural Arch in the Uttewalder Grund c. 1801 | CAT 44 background with trees and rocks positioned on either side, is relatively conventional; and indeed, there were precedents for this veduta-like approach, for example in Carl Gottfried Nestler’s series of engravings Prospecte des Plauschen Grundes bey Dresden,15 and the series of views after Klengel’s washed pen-and-ink drawings.16 One of Friedrich’s gouaches was itself used as the model for a hand-coloured outline etching.17 To these veduta-like works, Friedrich brought a feeling for colour that gave them a painterly charm, even before he made the switch to oil painting. In Saxony, role models in the use of gouache were to be found not only in artists like Jakob Philipp Hackert but also in painters working for the porcelain manufactory at Meissen – the likes of Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich (called Dietricy), Johann Georg Wagner, Carl Gottlob Ehrlich and Johann Friedrich Nagel. Despite his early death in 1767, Wagner was still well known in artist circles and among art collectors; his gouaches, influenced by Dietrich, his uncle and teacher, display the loose brushwork and sophisticated use of colour (fig. 3) of ‘canvas painting on paper’. THE NATURAL ARCH TO THE UTTEWALDER GRUND GORGE IN SAXON SWITZERLAND When Friedrich embarked on his earliest hikes, beginning in 1799, his interest in the landscapes of Dresden’s wider surroundings was inspired by Karl August Engelhardt’s illustrated Malerische Reise durch Sachsen (or “Picturesque Journeys through Saxony”),18 with copperplate prints by Philipp Veith, and Johann Jakob Brückner’s Pitoreskische Reisen durch Sachsen … (or “Picturesque Travels through Saxony or the Natural Beauties of Saxon Regions as Gathered on a Journey with Friends”), containing etchings by Christian August Günther.19 In the two books, Veith and Günther, both pupils of Zingg, used standard graphic techniques of printmaking to reproduce striking landscape features in fully realised pictorial compositions. When Caspar David Friedrich
The Draughtsman 136 7 Caspar David Friedrich Small Landscape in Circular Format c. 1794 | CAT 2 8 Caspar David Friedrich Landscape with Footbridge c. 1801 | CAT 62 9 Caspar David Friedrich Landscape with Manor House 12 October 1799 | CAT 27 drew the natural arch at the Uttewalder Grund on 28 August 1800 (fig. 4),20 he may already have seen Günther’s version of the same motif. At any rate, the sepia drawing he made based on the sketch (fig. 5) would suggest so, because, like Günther’s etching, it, too, shows two figures reacting to the sight of the rock formation by raising their arms to point at it (fig. 6). A comparison of Friedrich’s sepia drawing with Zingg’s depiction of the Zscherregrund rock formation,21 where an idyllic pastoral scene is glimpsed through the rock arch, makes the contrast between the mighty, lowering rocks and the tiny human figures in Friedrich’s drawing more fully apparent. This proportional exaggeration was not echoed in any of the drawings or prints by the many later artists to visit the Utterwalder Grund, like Carus, Hammer and Johan Christian Dahl. In his painting of the Grund, however, Friedrich’s pupil August Heinrich pursued exaggeration in another direction by reproducing every single sunlit leaf in the greatest possible individual detail.22 LANDSCAPE ETCHINGS AND STUDIES AROUND 1800 Like Günther, Friedrich also tried his hand at etching. While still a student, he had made tiny circular etchings of landscapes with trees (fig.7).23 “Most of Friedrich’s etchings reflect the park theory of the Age of Sentimentalism,” was how Werner Sumowski summed up the conventionalism of Friedrich’s early Dresden etchings. Sumowski pointed to Christian Cai Lorenz Hirschfeld’s Theory of Garden Art and such etchings series as Johann Adolph Darnstedt’s Views from the Seifersdorf Valley of 1793 as emblematic works of the period and highlighted the “stylistic borrowing from Hackert’s Rügen landscapes and Veith’s vedute” in Friedrich’s etchings (fig. 8).24 Technically, in landscape etching, the young Friedrich was experimenting with a medium with an illustrious tradition in Saxony, its exponents including Samuel Bottschild, Johann Alexander Thiele, Charles François Hutin, Bernardo Bellotto, Adam Friedrich Oeser, Adrian Zingg, Johann Christian Klengel and Christoph Nathe. Indeed, Thiele and Bellotto had produced whole series of etchings.25 Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn dabbled in the technique, while Dietrich, Klengel and Nathe all left large numbers of etched works.26 Their guides to the art of landscape etching had been the masters of the previous century, such as Rembrandt, Alaert van Everdingen, Jacob van Ruisdael, Herman van Swanevelt, Anthonie Waterloo and Jan Both. With their technical virtuosity and artistic freedom, Klengel’s landscape etchings were, in turn, an important inspiration for later peintre-graveurs. In the case of Zingg’s technique of washed outline etching, a whole workshop eventually ensured the production of a swelling stream of pic9 7 8
137 10 Caspar David Friedrich Farmhouses by a Hillside 1799 | CAT 23 11 Christoph Nathe View of the Tower of the Frauenkirche from Southern Section of the Görlitz Moat | undated Etching and aquatint in brown, 167×204 mm (plate) Kulturhistorisches Museum Görlitz, Graphisches Kabinett, inv. 31344 12 Caspar David Friedrich Landscape with Ruins and Two Figures 29 September 1802 | CAT 63 tures,27 culminating in, amongst others, Carl August and Ludwig Richter’s 70 Mahlerische An und Aussichten … (or “Seventy Picturesque Views of and from the Surroundings of Dresden within a Radius of Six to Eight Miles”)28 of 1820 and 30 An und Aussichten … (or “Thirty Views and Vistas to Accompany the Pocket Guide to Saxon Switzerland”)29 of 1823, in which the father and son popularised Zingg’s style of landscape depiction in a small format, producing charming, precise images that managed to convey narrative content and atmosphere at the same time. In the years around 1800, Friedrich completed a series of outline etchings based on preparatory pen-and-ink drawings. A Landscape with Manor House, dated 12 October 179930 and identified as a scene in Dresden-Loschwitz near the bridge known as the Mordgrundbrücke (fig. 9), served as the model for an etching now known from a trial proof preserved in Berlin. Friedrich cursorily marked the outline of the projected picture field in pen.31 Preparation for the etching involved, as before, going over the initial pencil drawing in pen and ink, bringing out the contrast between the cubic forms of the buildings and the abbreviated pencil notation indicating the foliage of the trees. Similar in choice of motif and style is an etching dedicated to Friedrich’s Greifswald teacher Johann Gottfried Quistorp (fig. 10), which is very closely modelled on a drawing of 4 August 1799.32 The empty middle ground in this work also resembles areas in later paintings, like Morning Mist, where thick swathes of mist partly block the view and the mountain peak appears to float in the picture space, making it impossible to reach (fig. 16, p. 314). Friedrich was not the only artist to adopt this pictorial approach, as an aquatint etching by Christoph Nathe33 demonstrates (fig. 11). Here, too, there is a break in the foreground, separating brown-tinted passages from areas with simple etched contours. Other examples of Nathe’s etched works, comprising over 100 plates, also show similarities with Friedrich’s etchings.34 10 12 11
The Draughtsman 156 Florian Illies THE ABSENT DRESDEN Just as interesting as what great artists choose to paint is what they patently leave out. Surprisingly, Caspar David Friedrich, who lived in Dresden from 1798 to 1840, did not paint any urban scenes of the city in which he spent most of his life, nor any classic vedute that show its famous silhouette. This is unusual for two reasons: Friedrich’s friend and neighbour, the painter Johan Christian Dahl had no such qualms. Around 1830, he regularly captured the magnificent sequence of the city’s spires and towers, the Frauenkirche, the Hofkirche, and the Residenzschloss as seen from the right bank of the Elbe – a view immortalised by Canalleto’s nephew, Bernardo Bellotto, in numerous variations – casting it in the pictorial language of Romanticism with low-angle perspectives and dramatic skies (fig. 1). We have similar, veduta-like views by Friedrich of his native Greifswald1 and of the city of Neubrandenburg,2 from where his parents hailed. In each of these, Friedrich chose to put some distance between himself and the city, capturing its silhouette in reverent detail from a low vantage point and positioning it in the middle ground of his composition. It would appear that the ‘Canaletto view’ of a ‘Florence on the Elbe’ as enshrined by the Italian court painter was too prescriptive for Friedrich the artist and seasoned Dresden resident.3 Just how much Friedrich engaged with Bellotto and the legacy of the Canaletto style is demonstrated by a hitherto overlooked adaptation: Friedrich drew on Bellotto’s large-format painting of The Market Square of Pirna4 for a highly unusual bird’s-eyeview watercolour showing his own family milling about the market square in Greifswald.5 Although Friedrich lived in Dresden for 42 years and was an indefatigably obsessive draughtsman, there are virtually no pencil drawings of the city by the artist. Only once, on 23 April 1800, did he produce a small pencil sketch that meticulously captures the pinnacles of the Hausmannsturm, the Hofkirche, the dome of the Frauenkirche, and the ridge turret of the Old Town Hall (fig. 2).6 It is precisely these pinnacles that would later make an understated appearance in two famous paintings, rising in the hazy distance behind a composition-defining hill in the foreground, which Friedrich used to mask the architectural beauty of the city that was clearly overwhelming him. In his Hill with Boggy Ground near Dresden (fig. 3), it is the prosaic, freshly ploughed soil and a bare-branched orchard that obscure the distant city bathed in a milky, pale-blue light. In his Evening Star,7 on the other hand, it is a young boy on the crest of the hill that attracts our full attention – the tops of the spires of Dresden’s churches are hidden behind the hill, inconspicuously in line with the soaring poplar trees to the left and right. Only the Augustusbrücke – seen from his home at An der Elbe 33 – became a motif for Friedrich – most strikingly so in the painting formerly in the collection of the Hamburger Kunsthalle (The Augustus Bridge in Dresden).8 Caspar David Friedrich’s rejection of Dresden as a sub-
1 Johan Christian Dahl View of Dresden by Moonlight 1839 | CAT 243
The Draughtsman 158 ject is at its most subtle in his painting Woman at a Window (fig. 28, p. 204). He has deliberately positioned his wife Caroline in front of the window in such a way that we cannot look out onto the Elbe, onto the riverbank known as the Neustädter Ufer. Friedrich keeps the viewer trapped inside, just as he himself hardly ever left his studio. Only at dusk did he venture outside, because then the overpowering silhouette of the city was muted, and he could train his original gaze on the world in the twilight. 1 Caspar David Friedrich, Meadows near Greifswald, 1821/1822, oil on canvas, 34.5 × 48.3 cm, Hamburger Kunsthalle, inv. HK-1047 (BS/J 285). 2 Caspar David Friedrich, Neubrandenburg in the Morning Mist, 1816/1817, oil on canvas, 91 × 72 cm, Greifswald, Pommersches Landesmuseum (BS/J 225). 3 Bernardo Bellotto, called Canaletto, Dresden from the Right Bank of the Elbe Below the Augustus Bridge, 1748, oil on canvas, 133×237 cm, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Gal.-Nr. 606. 4 Bernardo Bellotto, called Canaletto, The Market Square of Pirna, 1753/1754, oil on canvas, 136 × 239.5 cm, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Gal.-Nr. 623. 5 Caspar David Friedrich, The Greifswald Market Square, 1818, watercolour on paper, 54.5×67 cm, Pommersches Landesmuseum, Greifswald (BS/J 251). 6 These forms are also to be seen in his 1824 oil sketch Evening (Sunset behind the Dresden Hofkirche), 1824, oil on canvas, 20.8 × 24.7 cm, private collection (BS/J 320). 7 Caspar David Friedrich, Evening Star, c. 1830, oil on canvas, 33 × 45.2 cm, Frankfurt am Main, Freies Deutsches Hochstift/Frankfurter Goethe-Museum, inv. IV-1950-007 (BS/J 389). 8 Caspar David Friedrich, The Augustus Bridge in Dresden, c.1830, oil on canvas, measurements unknown, Hamburger Kunsthalle (destroyed in fire in Munich 1931), inv. E-1054 (BS/J 384). 2 Caspar David Friedrich Spruce Study (left); Hausmannsturm, Tower of the Hofkirche, Dome of the Frauenkirche, Ridge Turret of the Altstadt Town Hall (right) Disbound Berlin Sketchbook II, pp. 56, 57 23 April 1800 | CAT 29
3 Caspar David Friedrich Hill with Boggy Ground near Dresden 1824/1825 | CAT 160
The Painter 190 Holger Birkholz CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH AND THE OLD MASTERS In a letter Caspar David Friedrich wrote to King Friedrich August I of Saxony in 1816 regarding his appointment as a member of the Academy, the artist was keen to emphasise that Dresden’s “most excellent art treasures”1 were one of the reasons why, in 1798, he had come to the city in the first place. Even at the time of his earliest success, Friedrich’s work was considered against the wider backdrop of the leading landscape painters of the past, chief among them Jacob van Ruisdael, Salvator Rosa, and Claude Lorrain.2 Irrespective of the art-theoretical discourse of the time, we can make out concrete correlations between Friedrich’s works and those of the Old Masters that he would have seen at the Dresden Gemäldegalerie. He adopted common tropes such as sunsets or the graveyard scene, picked up compositional schemes and sketched staffage figures and even a rock formation he found in landscape paintings on exhibit there. Studying the Old Masters and copying their works was fundamental to the basic training of aspiring artists at the time. During his drawing lessons with Johann Gottfried Quistorp in Greifswald, Friedrich had drawn from prints,3 and even at the Copenhagen Academy, the curriculum consisted largely of drawing from prints and plaster casts.4 As a result, Friedrich was very sceptical about the merits of copying. Many years later, around 1830, he was to remark: “Those who have esprit do not copy others.”5 And of his own students, he demanded a high degree of self-sufficiency, which he only managed to acquire in himself once he had left the classroom behind.6 When Friedrich arrived in Dresden in 1798, he encountered a markedly different approach in the person of Adrian Zingg, who, unlike his previous teachers in Copenhagen, advocated the rigorous study of nature and rejected emulating the Old Masters, despite his students’ proximity to one of the very best picture galleries north of the Alps. Writing to his friend Johan Ludwig Lund, with whom he had studied in Copenhagen, Friedrich reported that Johann Carl August Richter had told him that he (Richter) had “not yet seen the gallery or the Kupferstich Kabinett, because old Zing[g] thought it was unnecessary.”7 Friedrich evidently took a different view. He paid regular visits to the Dresden Gemäldegalerie, and not only does his work bear witness to the 1 | 2 Caspar David Friedrich F igure Studies. Drawings after Staffage in Netherlandish Paintings in the Dresden Picture Gallery c. 1800 | CAT 30
The Painter 192 impact some of the paintings in the collection had on him, those visits are also mentioned in written sources. The Russian poet and imperial court tutor Vasily Zhukovsky, for example, described visits to the picture gallery with Friedrich in April 1821. To his surprise, Friedrich “could not name the painters” of many of the works, “but he found beauty or defects in numerous paintings that only those who have looked into the textbook of nature would ever notice.”8 He also reported on Friedrich’s assessment of three religious works in the gallery – Titian’s The Tribute Money,9 Carlo Dolci’s Christ Blessing the Sacraments,10 and Ercole de’ Roberti’s painting of The Ascent to Calvary11 – all of which revolved around the question of the truth of feeling,12 a topic that Friedrich would later address in his own written work of art criticism.13 STAFFAGE Friedrich’s struggles with the human figure and his alleged inability to render it convincingly has become something of a trope among Friedrich scholars and is based primarily on the elongated figures in his Schiller illustrations of 1801.14 In 1811, it was even claimed that some of the figures in Friedrich’s landscape paintings had in fact been painted by his friend, the artist Georg Friedrich Kersting.15 Friedrich’s engagement with the figures that enliven his landscapes runs through his entire oeuvre – from the figure studies on a sketchbook sheet of 1799/1800 (fig. 1) to the abbreviated marks he used to indicate the size of people in his landscape studies and the two unrealised wanderers in The Large Enclosure near Dresden of 1832 (fig. 15, p. 289).16 3 Adriaen Fransz. Boudewijns and Peeter Bout Well on the Lake Shore Not dated | CAT 216 4 Adriaen Fransz. Boudewijns, Peeter Bout Well on the Lake Shore Not dated | CAT 261 Detail from fig. 3 5 Caspar David Friedrich Figure Studies. Drawings after Staffage in Netherlandish Paintings in the Dresden Picture Gallery | 1800 | CAT 30 Detail from fig. 1
193 to collect a stockbook of possible human poses.19 In so doing, he plucked them out of the context of the original composition, where, among other things, they had functioned as perspectival markers, and he lined them up in neat rows for future reference.20 One sheet is inscribed with the name “Bout”,21 probably added later by an unknown hand to identify some of the figures gathered there as being based on works in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie. The works in question were painted by two artists working in collaboration: Adriaen Fransz. Boudewijns was responsible for the landscape, while Peeter Bout painted the lively staffage. These two 17th-century Flemish painters frequently collaborated and formed a highly successful partnership. Five of the originally eight paintings by 6 Caspar David Friedrich Mountain Landscape with Rainbow c. 1809/1810 | CAT 101 the two artists are still in the Dresden collection today.22 Some of the figures sketched by Friedrich can be found in their canvases.23 Friedrich drew inspiration from them, and they resurfaced – albeit with some modifications – in several of his paintings many years later. In a painting by Boudewijns and Bout, the figure of the beggar hanging around a harbour and leaning on a stick (figs. 3, 4) is taken out of its original context for the sketchbook sheet (fig. 5). One of the reasons why Friedrich was interested in this figure may have been that it reminded him of wayfarers he had encountered on his travels and captured in his drawings.24 This figure makes an appearance in several of his paintings, most recognisably in his Mountain Landscape with Rainbow of 1809/1810 (fig. 6). As is not uncommon in Friedrich’s work, lines can be drawn from otherwise perfectly inconspicuous early drawings or studies to much later periods of his career, several decades later.17 Four pages of a sketchbook from his early years in Dresden around 1800 (fig. 2) show human figures drawn in a simple outline style, which Werner Sumowski astutely recognised as having been copied from various paintings in the Dresden gallery.18 Lifted primarily from Netherlandish 17th-century pictures, these small anonymous figures enliven landscapes and harbour scenes. Friedrich’s selection of these incidental figures in various poses and with different expressions is distributed even-handedly across the pages of his sketchbook. Their arrangement and isolation seems analytical, as if he wanted
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