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
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