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.
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