329 should interpret it as one of Friedrich’s sketchbooks, in which he was collecting material for his works. The upper horizontal line runs through the nails from which the set square and the ruler are suspended, which is unlikely to be a coincidence. One possible interpretation would therefore be: Friedrich is standing in front of the easel, waiting for the moment of inspiration. The execution will draw on his close observations of nature recorded in the sketchbook. However, he must first establish the compositional structure of his canvas, into which the individual elements will then be inserted. By choosing to apply the principle of the golden ratio, he invests the painting with a deeper meaning and taps into the divine order. With good reason, ever since the 16th century the golden ratio has been referred to by some as the “divine proportion”.8 The compositional structure is set out with the help of the measuring instruments hanging on the wall. Kersting is likely to have been able to familiarise himself with Friedrich’s methods by studying his highly finished sepia drawings of windows of 1805/1806,9 in 1 See Schnell 1994, pp. 24–32, 41–47, 156–158, cat. A. 27, A 48, A 72. 2 For works produced during this walking tour, see essay by Dirk Gedlich in this volume, pp. 168–173. 3 See Schnell 1994, cat. A 28. 4 See Bouvier 1828, p. 344. 5 Recommended, for example, in Van Mander 1604, fol. 34. 6 See Schnell 1994, cat. 149. 7 Goethe, for example, acquired the prints after the heads of the Last Supper published by Giuseppe Bossi in 1808, see exh. cat. Frankfurt 1994, cats. 30–37, pp. 73–76. 8 See Busch 2003, pp. 101–122; Busch 2021, pp. 2– 42. 9 See Busch 2003, pp. 11–21, 26–33. 10 Caspar David Friedrich, Morning in the Giant Mountains, 1810, oil on canvas, 108× 170 cm, Berlin, Neuer Pavillon, Schlosspark Charlottenburg, inv. GK I 6911. 11 BS/J 190. The reviewer of the painting asserts that Kersting had painted the figures, in Anonymous 1811, pp. 371–373. which keys and scissors hanging from nails on the wall mark the lines of the golden ratio with millimetre precision. Finally, the canvas on the easel is probably Friedrich’s Morning in the Giant Mountains.10 The fruit of the walking tour through the Bohemian mountains he had undertaken with Kersting, that painting was completed in 1811. Kersting was even thought by one critic to have contributed the tiny figures on the summit.11 Painted a few years later, Kersting’s third studio portrait of Friedrich (fig. 4) is broadly similar to the first, albeit with clear differences in the temperature of the light and the picture on the easel. While the work from 1811 shows the studio flooded with bright daylight and the artist working on a landscape with a waterfall, the view through the window in the last of the three studio paintings shows signs of dusk, while the canvas on the easel is still completely blank. It remains unclear what prompted Kersting to paint his series of artists in their studios. Were they painted on commission, or should we read them as tributes to his colleagues and their different personalities?
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