The Painter 190 Holger Birkholz CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH AND THE OLD MASTERS In a letter Caspar David Friedrich wrote to King Friedrich August I of Saxony in 1816 regarding his appointment as a member of the Academy, the artist was keen to emphasise that Dresden’s “most excellent art treasures”1 were one of the reasons why, in 1798, he had come to the city in the first place. Even at the time of his earliest success, Friedrich’s work was considered against the wider backdrop of the leading landscape painters of the past, chief among them Jacob van Ruisdael, Salvator Rosa, and Claude Lorrain.2 Irrespective of the art-theoretical discourse of the time, we can make out concrete correlations between Friedrich’s works and those of the Old Masters that he would have seen at the Dresden Gemäldegalerie. He adopted common tropes such as sunsets or the graveyard scene, picked up compositional schemes and sketched staffage figures and even a rock formation he found in landscape paintings on exhibit there. Studying the Old Masters and copying their works was fundamental to the basic training of aspiring artists at the time. During his drawing lessons with Johann Gottfried Quistorp in Greifswald, Friedrich had drawn from prints,3 and even at the Copenhagen Academy, the curriculum consisted largely of drawing from prints and plaster casts.4 As a result, Friedrich was very sceptical about the merits of copying. Many years later, around 1830, he was to remark: “Those who have esprit do not copy others.”5 And of his own students, he demanded a high degree of self-sufficiency, which he only managed to acquire in himself once he had left the classroom behind.6 When Friedrich arrived in Dresden in 1798, he encountered a markedly different approach in the person of Adrian Zingg, who, unlike his previous teachers in Copenhagen, advocated the rigorous study of nature and rejected emulating the Old Masters, despite his students’ proximity to one of the very best picture galleries north of the Alps. Writing to his friend Johan Ludwig Lund, with whom he had studied in Copenhagen, Friedrich reported that Johann Carl August Richter had told him that he (Richter) had “not yet seen the gallery or the Kupferstich Kabinett, because old Zing[g] thought it was unnecessary.”7 Friedrich evidently took a different view. He paid regular visits to the Dresden Gemäldegalerie, and not only does his work bear witness to the 1 | 2 Caspar David Friedrich F igure Studies. Drawings after Staffage in Netherlandish Paintings in the Dresden Picture Gallery c. 1800 | CAT 30
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