The Draughtsman 48 on one sheet of the Berlin Sketchbook I together with a cloud study are a number of small, cursorily executed figures, consisting only of outlines without any modelling (fig. 3). The Berlin Sketchbook II, which dates from the following year, again documents Friedrich’s interest in studies of figures in various poses, which he sketched from Dutch and Flemish paintings in the Dresden 1 Caspar David Friedrich Two Tree Studies, Hanging Laundry Disbound Berlin Sketchbook I c. 1799 | CAT 15 Gemäldegalerie for later use as models for accessory figures (figs. 1, 2, p. 191).6 With the exception of the Small Manheim Sketchbook,7 Friedrich’s sketchbooks are dominated by studies of vegetation, trees, rock formations and landscapes. On 20 April 1799, he sketched a still-leafless tree standing on a hillside (fig. 4). He provides a few hints concerning the surrounding landscape: a small bridge with wooden handrails, and on the upper right, a tall sapling. Using pencil, Friedrich traces the intricate ramifications of the branches, which hang downward above the slope, down to the smallest detail. As indicated by its sinuous outline, the right hand side of the tree, bare of branches, lies in shadow. Friedrich had proceeded similarly two years earlier – then still in Copenhagen – in a study of a leafed-out oak tree (fig. 5). With foliage outlined in jagged lines and its forceful presence heightened through modelling with coarse hatching lines, it otherwise has little in common with the graceful and almost curvaceous branches of the early sheet in the sketchbook from the Dresden period, although it too, as notated by the artist, was executed “after nature in 1797”. Friedrich reworked his pencil studies from nature – for the most part, presumably, in the studio – with pencil or pen and brush, overdrawing them using carbon black or iron-gall ink, and applying washes consisting of diluted pigment or ink and brown-toned watercolours such as ochre or bistre mixtures. Colour samples are found at the margins of a study of a conifer dated 1798, whose contours were essentially omitted and applied later using a brush over the preliminary pencil drawing. They show how Friedrich blended together the almost sepia-like greyish-brown tone from various colours (fig. 6). Here, too, he has inscribed the notation “from nature”. Still perceptible in studies from 1799 from the Berlin Sketchbook I – among them a study of vegetation at the foot of a tree trunk (fig. 7) and a study of a massive, leafy tree near a boulder, executed in pen over pencil without additional internal modelling (fig. 8) – is the influence of contemporary drawing manuals, among them Adrian Zingg’s Anfangsgründe für Landschaftszeichner, on the “Fundamentals of Landscape Drawing”.8 The blackening on the reverse of the hitherto unidentified landscape Stream with a Bridge, also dating from 1799, indicates that it was conceived as the design for an etching (fig. 9). With its only partial application of wash to the cloudy sky, partly unfinished descriptive linework, and
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