193 to collect a stockbook of possible human poses.19 In so doing, he plucked them out of the context of the original composition, where, among other things, they had functioned as perspectival markers, and he lined them up in neat rows for future reference.20 One sheet is inscribed with the name “Bout”,21 probably added later by an unknown hand to identify some of the figures gathered there as being based on works in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie. The works in question were painted by two artists working in collaboration: Adriaen Fransz. Boudewijns was responsible for the landscape, while Peeter Bout painted the lively staffage. These two 17th-century Flemish painters frequently collaborated and formed a highly successful partnership. Five of the originally eight paintings by 6 Caspar David Friedrich Mountain Landscape with Rainbow c. 1809/1810 | CAT 101 the two artists are still in the Dresden collection today.22 Some of the figures sketched by Friedrich can be found in their canvases.23 Friedrich drew inspiration from them, and they resurfaced – albeit with some modifications – in several of his paintings many years later. In a painting by Boudewijns and Bout, the figure of the beggar hanging around a harbour and leaning on a stick (figs. 3, 4) is taken out of its original context for the sketchbook sheet (fig. 5). One of the reasons why Friedrich was interested in this figure may have been that it reminded him of wayfarers he had encountered on his travels and captured in his drawings.24 This figure makes an appearance in several of his paintings, most recognisably in his Mountain Landscape with Rainbow of 1809/1810 (fig. 6). As is not uncommon in Friedrich’s work, lines can be drawn from otherwise perfectly inconspicuous early drawings or studies to much later periods of his career, several decades later.17 Four pages of a sketchbook from his early years in Dresden around 1800 (fig. 2) show human figures drawn in a simple outline style, which Werner Sumowski astutely recognised as having been copied from various paintings in the Dresden gallery.18 Lifted primarily from Netherlandish 17th-century pictures, these small anonymous figures enliven landscapes and harbour scenes. Friedrich’s selection of these incidental figures in various poses and with different expressions is distributed even-handedly across the pages of his sketchbook. Their arrangement and isolation seems analytical, as if he wanted
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTMyNjA1