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-
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