47 | Detail 8 | Detail “Furnished with pencil and paper / not forgetting the rubber”, we read in two lines of a longer “verse letter” written in circa 1802/1803, which describes Friedrich setting forth to sketch from nature.1 This minimal inventory of equipment seems to have sufficed for most of his forays.2 As a rule, his sketching paper was contained in a bound notebook.3 In her catalogue raisonné, Christina Grummt assigns 404 of the altogether 1014 sheets attributed to Caspar David Friedrich to a total of seventeen different sketchbooks.4 Many of these sheets are double-sided, which indicates that approximately one half of Friedrich’s surviving drawings must have come from sketchbooks. Only six of these have survived in a bound state, while all the others have meanwhile been disbound and the sheets dispersed.5 The Berlin Sketchbook I – the first sketchbook, produced in 1799 during the Dresden period, and no longer in a bound condition – is preserved at the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin. It contains a pencil drawing of the foliage of two pine trees, their open contours indicated by small strokes and hooks in a style familiar from many later drawings. The trees stand “in der Ferne” (in the distance) in relation to the viewer, as Friedrich notates fastidiously alongside each tree trunk (fig. 1). In 1807, we re-encounter the lefthand tree, also on the left and again seen from a distance, at the edge of the painting View over the Elbe Valley (fig. 24, p. 143). Alongside trees, a typical study motif, Friedrich occasionally took up his pencil to record objects from everyday life – in this case three towels hanging from a clothesline, and below them, indicated only with fine contour lines, a drying shirt. Its folds are delineated by loose but clearly placed strokes. Surviving from his boat crossing from Copenhagen in the Copenhagen Sketchbook are three sheets dated 5–7 May 1799. Executed for practice, or simply as a diversion, they depict fellow travellers in various poses: standing, lying down or seated. Similar hatching lines are observable here in the rendering of items of clothing (fig. 1). Contained Petra Kuhlmann-Hodick | Johanna Ziegler OBSERVATIONS ON FRIEDRICH’S NATURE STUDIES AND PRELIMINARY DRAWINGS
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