285 7 Caspar David Friedrich Two Men Contemplating the Moon | 1819/1820 Detail of fig. 3, p. 252 Sky with stippling, pencil underdrawing visible in moon. 8 Caspar David Friedrich Dolmen in the Snow | 1807 Detail of fig. 1, p. 249 Left: left-hand oak tree. Right: same detail superimposed with enlarged and darkened outlines from sketch from Karlsruhe Sketchbook of 1804 (nos. 8, 9, p. 11) shine through the thin upper paint layers and are visible to the naked eye (fig. 21). Friedrich was obviously not bothered by these delicate textures and also overlooked the occasional deeper scratch mark (fig. 5).22 Most buyers were probably completely unaware of the two-colour structure of most of the grounds revealed by analysis of the cross-sections (fig. 6). Presumably for economic reasons, the manufacturers mixed inexpensive ochre, burnt red earth, chalk and barium sulphate into the lower primer layers, which only served to smooth and even out the weave texture. The upper visible layers of primer are dominated by a high proportion of expensive lead white, presumably primarily bound in oil. Friedrich painted most of his pictures on a patchy whitish ground, which set the tone for his thinly applied colours. The fact that Friedrich chose the tonality of his grounds to suit the subject or motif of the planned painting is demonstrated by the example of Two Men Contemplating the Moon.23 Here the reddish ochre tone of the uppermost layer of the ground serves not only as the mid-tone of the near-monochromatic palette of this late evening mood, but it also remains visible beneath the loosely applied paint of the finished work.24 COMPOSITION, PREPARATORY DRAWING, TRANSFER Without exception, Caspar David Friedrich’s works in oil were painted in his sparsely furnished and functional studio, of which we have a fairly accurate idea thanks to the “studio scenes” by his friend Kersting (fig. 1, p. 327). The fact that no compositional sketches or cartoons have come down to us seems to lend credibility to Carl Gustav Carus’s posthumous description of Friedrich’s compositional process: “He never made sketches, cartoons, or colour studies for his paintings, because he claimed […] that such aids tended to cool the imagination. He never went to work on a painting until it stood lifelike before him in his mind’s eye […].”25 In contrast to his approach to the overall composition, which, he thought, should ideally spring from the artist’s creative imagination as the “free, mental re-creation of nature”,26 Friedrich attached great importance to the precise rendering of details and to the close study of nature – true to his maxim “[…] study nature after nature and not after paintings.”27 Some 1000 drawings, most of them made outdoors, bear eloquent testimony to Friedrich’s talent as a draughtsman. They capture not only slices of landscapes but also portray individual stones, roots or branches with great precision. As has often been pointed out, the fact that Friedrich used these studies of nature as props and moveable set-pieces shows that he conceived of the specifics of the natural world as a manifestation of God’s creation and thus as core building blocks or even binding truths for the artist to heed. In this approach, he followed Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes’s widely circulated artists’ manual,28 published in a German translation in 1803, which emphasised the importance of close observation: “Notice all the little things about the bark, the moss, the roots, the sweep of the branches […].”29 “One has to follow nature in studies of this kind and search for truths […].”30 On the other hand, Valenciennes gives a detailed example to describe this kind of ‘cut-and-paste technique’: “The imagination now places the pleasant fountain together with its surroundings under this second view. The artist reaches for his drawing pencil, draws both together, and thus unites two beautiful objects in a single painting that will be much more accomplished than if he had depicted them separately.”31 It remains a mystery how Friedrich actually accomplished this cut-and-paste montage,
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