The Painter 238 Holger Birkholz A PERFECT WORK OF ART: THE TETSCHEN ALTARPIECE “Have you finished the altarpiece? I would like to see it, I think it will make a great impression,”1 Friedrich’s sister Catharina Dorothea Sponholz asked her brother in October 1808. The question reflects the high expectations placed on the painting, especially because works of art were rarely the subject of the family’s correspondence. Friedrich must therefore have told his sister about working on his “altarpiece” and the special significance he attached to it. When Friedrich’s painting The Cross in the Mountains (fig.1) – known in German as the Tetschener Altar since its sale to the von ThunHohenstein family – was first presented to the public on Christmas Day of 1808, it caused a sensation. By contrast, the earliest sketches in which the artist developed his idea for the composition are quite unspectacular and offer little indication of what they would culminate in. In 1799, Friedrich had seen a wayside cross in a rocky crevice (fig. 14, p. 138) and captured a few scattered boulders, probably somewhere in the vicinity of Dresden (fig. 10, p. 50). Inspired by the Honigstein in Saxon Switzerland,2 Friedrich gradually developed the motif of the central, pyramidal mountain peak surmounted by a cross.3 He worked through the theme in numerous variations4 until the individual elements came together in the sepia Cross in the Mountains (fig. 50, p. 62) around 1806. When he decided to execute this composition in oil, however, Friedrich changed most of the trees in the picture, among them spruces he had drawn as recently as 1807.5 Only the tallest tree, drawn in 1804,6 remained in its position. It dominates not only the centre of the two versions of The Cross in the Mountains but also that of the painting View over the Elbe Valley (fig. 2), made around the same time. The revised spruces are slimmer than originally envisaged, which accentuates the heavenward momentum of the composition, as do the new addition of visible rays of light and the shift from the round arch of the painting to the pointed arch of the frame. 1 Caspar David Friedrich The Cross in the Mountains (Tetschen Altarpiece) 1807/1808 | CAT 99
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