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
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTMyNjA1