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
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