283 3 Caspar David Friedrich The Cross in the Mountains | 1807/1808 Back of painting with its original stretcher frame. been relined – the original canvases are structurally sound and did not require the attachment of a new canvas to the back of the existing one for reinforcement. One of the four, The Cross in the Mountains (or Tetschen Altarpiece) (fig. 1, p. 239), has only been taken off its original stretcher once, in 1965, while only the corners of The Large Enclosure near Dresden (Das Grosse Gehege) (fig. 13, p. 274) have ever come off the original stretcher for retensioning.12 While it is imperative to preserve these rare authentic conditions for as long as possible, they do mean that the works of art are particularly fragile. As there is only very limited retouching in most of the paintings examined here, the quality of Friedrich’s handling of the paint is still readily apparent. It is evident from his letters that Caspar David Friedrich coated recently completed oil paintings with a temporary egg-white film before presenting them to the public, leaving it to the buyer to deal with washing it off and getting the painting properly varnished with a mastic resin solution within the space of a year.13 To date, analysis of paint-sample cross-sections has revealed evidence of an egg-white coating only for the painting View over the Elbe Valley (fig. 24, p. 143). STRETCHER AND CANVAS WEAVE Five original stretcher frames of the Dresden paintings have a blind mortise-and-tenon joint at the corners, which allows for independent expansion in height and width. This type of stretcher, made of softwood and often fitted with hardwood wedges, is the most common in Friedrich’s oeuvre. Two other stretchers, probably also dating from the period in which the paintings were completed, have a bevelled edge on the canvas side. There can be little doubt that the expandable stretcher with a central cross brace over which the canvas for The Cross in the Mountains was stretched before Friedrich set to work on the painting was custom-made to the artist’s exacting specifications (fig. 3).14 Friedrich favoured a single strip of canvas as the support for his oil paintings, no matter what their dimensions. This means that even in comparatively large formats such as that of The Cemetery (fig. 8, p. 224) there are no seams.15 Made from locally grown flax,16 the canvases were woven on handlooms in a simple plain weave. In his late work, Friedrich tended to prefer finer, more densely woven canvases than at the start of his career.17 Today, with the help of technical analyses, these fabrics can be classified more precisely. Special software is capable of producing thread count maps on the basis of scanned X-rays to identify pieces of canvas cut from the same roll or bolt.18 To date, the Dresden investigations have brought to light four such ‘weave matches’, which are not only of technical interest but may also help in dating the works and identifying the authorial intent behind thematically linked works long since separated from each other.19 The supports of the Dresden painting Two Men Contemplating the Moon (fig. 3, p. 252) and the Berlin variant Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon very probably come from the same roll of canvas.20 Dresden’s Ships in Harbour in the Evening and Berlin’s Coast in the Moonlight at the Alte Nationalgalerie also form a match. There is also a triple match between the paintings Bohemian Landscape with Mount Milleschauer and the Bohemian Landscape from the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (BS/J 189), which are regarded as pendants, and the painting Bohemian Landscape with a Lake from Weimar, which is identical in format (fig. 1, p. 175). However, as the small Dresden painting Trees and Bushes in the Snow (fig. 3, p. 259) and its pendant in Munich, Spruce
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