249 DOMESTIC AFFAIRS A letter from Friedrich August von Klinkowström to Philipp Otto Runge, dated 18 June 1806, reveals the extent to which the political circumstances of the Napoleonic Wars affected Friedrich’s health, as his painter friend reports: “Friedrich wrote to me after his illness, which I believe was caused by his anger over national affairs.”5 In December 1805, the Battle of Austerlitz had led to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation as part of the armistice negotiations. At the time, Friedrich was on the island of Rügen, where he developed a growing interest 1 Caspar David Friedrich Dolmen in the Snow 1807 | CAT 95 in pre-Christian history and drew the remains of its megalithic culture.6 On his return to Dresden, he produced the large sepia drawing Dolmen by the Sea (fig. 8, p. 102), combining the scene of a Stone Age site7 with drawings of three oak trees that he had previously sketched elsewhere.8 The evocation of a distant heroic past during the 1806 war reinforced the sense of a patriotic theme.9 Reviewing this sepia drawing in 1807, Carl Bertuch is said to have described the trees as “three great unshakable heroic characters”.10 Not much later Friedrich transformed this scene into a winter landscape in one of his first
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