Anyone who has developed an eye for the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich may be a bit surprised upon first viewing the water colour known as Blick auf Meissen (“View of Meissen”). It is indeed different, and hereby hangs a tale.
Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings have something purposeful about them: We sense that they draw us beyond the surface of things, but cannot tell exactly where their visual layout means to direct us. They can be structured in axially symmetrical fashion, thereby freezing all sense of motion. Or they can show a solitary figure with his back turned, as if inviting us to join him in his contemplation. Sometimes the objects presented in the paintings can be so pared down that we are tempted to ask why Friedrich thought it worthwhile to visualize such a minimal repertoire. We can detect parabolas and hyperbolas in his works and, in measuring out the curves and shapes he used, we realize that they essentially follow the proportions of the Golden Ratio.
So a strange interweaving of the abstract and the concrete becomes palpable. Art historians have determined that every single painting by Friedrich is laid out on the basis of careful, diagrammatic studies of the natural world: All the objects they present look true to nature; nothing is left to chance or mere fantasy. And nonetheless, the natural vistas found in Friedrich’s paintings could have arisen in any number of differing contexts, and could even have been created at entirely different points in time. So while each painting is built of “natural components” that are true to life in and of themselves, they have been integrated into an abstract structure of the image dictated by the artist.
The water colour shown here is fundamentally different in character. Or, to be more specific, like all of Friedrich’s water colours, it was created in a completely different manner than his paintings were. The reason is simple: all of Friedrich’s water colours are vedutas, i.e. panoramas recorded on location and then left entirely “as is.” They show a particular place precisely the way it looked at the time at which he drew it, and thus also function as a sort of historical record in the broader sense.
Friedrich actually began his career as a landscape artist. Before starting to paint in oils, he went on drawing trips to the North Sea island of Rügen or to the mountainous region known as the “Switzerland of Saxony” with its majestic rock formations. Upon returning home, he would render these drawings into sepia-ink versions of often ambitious scope, up to a meter in width. This imbued the new version with the artistic quality of a painting, or even allowed it to stand in lieu of a painting. Here, Friedrich was emulating the successful example of Adrian Zingg, who would convert his sepia drawings into prints featuring ultra-fine gradations of the brown base colour, namely by creating etched prints the outlines of which would then be coloured in by hand in his workshop using various shades of brown.
Friedrich, too, found a market for his sepia-ink drawings. Sometimes he would also begin rendering a drawing in water colour or gouache while it was still in its early stages. These sorts of works were apparently in demand as well, and so we find water colours of popular, identifiable vistas in various phases of Friedrich’s œuvre. The majority originates in the mid-1820s. In 1824/25, for example, he created as many as 37 water colours for a cycle of Rügen panoramas. Some of these have survived and tend to be closely modelled on earlier sketches, which the artist had created around 1800 (Grummt, 844-846).
This, then, is the historical backdrop for this particular water colour. Previously unknown to art historians, the work originates from a private collection in Saxony and perfectly complements a set of Meissen panoramas. Two of these views, drawn in pencil and dated October 1824 (Grummt, pages 860, 861), are almost certainly of a piece with additional works the artist created in Meissen: a drawing, a water colour, and a sepia drawing showing one of the arches of the bridge crossing the Elbe River and leading into Meissen. These three works executed on paper (Grummt, pages 759-761) are particularly interesting in that they illustrate the three stages of Friedrich’s creative process: First capturing the motif in a drawing, then rendering a first draft in vibrant water colour, and finally producing the end product as a painstakingly executed sepia-ink drawing.
Based on what is known about how construction work on the bridge progressed at the time, art historians have confirmed that this set of renderings of the bridge could only have been created after 1816 and before 1828. Inasmuch, they perhaps should not be attributed to 1816 in the catalogue raisonné, but rather to 1824, a year in which Friedrich is known to have visited Meissen, and in which he painted three water colours of the nearby ruined abbey of Heilig Kreuz (Grummt, 852-854). This in turn allows us to infer that the water colour “View of Meissen” probably also belongs to the works created by Friedrich during what was likely a somewhat extended sojourn in the historic town during October of 1824.
This naturally leads on to further considerations: Friedrich maintained a close friendship with Georg Friedrich Kersting, a painter a few years his junior. Possibly at Friedrich’s recommendation, Kersting spent three years early in the 19th century at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, which Friedrich himself had attended some years previously. Upon graduating, he settled in Dresden, just like Friedrich. In 1810, the two friends went hiking together through the Riesengebirge, the “Giant Mountains” along the Saxon-Bohemian border. Two highly programmatic paintings created by Kersting in 1811 and 1812 show Friedrich at work in his studio. During the turmoil of the subsequent Wars of Liberation from Napoleonic rule, Friedrich provided Kersting with financial support. In 1818, Kersting was appointed Chief Painter at Meissen’s renowned Porcelain Manufactory, a post he would hold until the end of his life in 1847. So it is likely that Friedrich stayed at Kersting’s house while visiting Meissen in 1824. And where was the Porcelain Manufactory located at that time, the company that Kersting looked after so well? Within the very same Albrechtsburg Castle complex that forms the main motif of the “View of Meissen” under discussion.
To record his vista, which he probably sketched out in pencil on location, Friedrich chose to stand on the right bank of the Elbe, which gave him a south-easterly view of the citadel with Albrechtsburg Castle and of Meissen Cathedral. Also clearly visible in the water colour are the convent buildings on the Burgplatz, the terraced vineyards along the slopes of the citadel; above all the great bridge over the Elbe River and the buildings seen up close on the other bank are clearly recognizable. The shadow patterns indicate that the veduta was created in the afternoon. The forms of the various buildings are precisely outlined. The thinly drawn pencil sketch is overlaid with black ink lines, some apparently penned in with the aid of a ruler. The outlined shapes are cleanly filled in with water colour. As is typical for Friedrich and his Saxon contemporaries, the surface colours are kept consistent and are generally not further shaded. Red, green, ochre shades, and a greyish brown used for shadowed roof surfaces make up the primary palette. The water of the Elbe River is rendered in a highly diluted grey-blue punctuated by coloured specks to suggest sunlight reflecting off the far bank and the bridge.
Standing tall behind Albrechtsburg Castle, the cathedral of Meissen does not yet boast the great towers that were to be added to its western façade only in the early 20th century. The highest of the citadel’s towers – also today – is the so-called “Höckrige Turm” (Knobby Tower) rising on the southeast side, while the external staircase known as the “Wendelstein,” with its distinctive blue spire roof, forms the eastern boundary of the Albrechtsburg. Friedrich placed two green poplars side by side beneath the base of the Wendelstein tower, apparently to reinforce the way the Albrechtsburg seems to terminate abruptly on the edge of a steep cliff. This could well be an example of the artistic license that Friedrich would often take in order to accentuate certain shapes. Which brings us to a question that cannot always be easily answered when it comes to a true-to-life landscape vista: What allows us to attribute this particular water colour to Friedrich so readily, leaving aside the convictions that expert knowledge brings with it? A number of minor but telling features provide the answer.
First of all, the sharp, vertical edge on the left-hand side of the water colour is highly unusual for this genre, particularly given that certain areas in the foreground and along the right border are merely adumbrated. We recognize this as a stylistic habit of Friedrich, particularly during his Meissen period. The cut-off line runs right down the middle of the objects shown, as if to indicate where the picture frame should go: Apparently, the artist wanted to define a distinct boundary for the image that would later serve as a reference when transposing the water colour to some other medium. In his fully completed and perfected water colours, the paint generally extends to the picture’s edge, and one occasionally finds signs indicating consciously made cuts. Thus, the manner of delineation used tells us that this was a first draft which was to be further refined.
That this is indeed true is made absolutely clear by the fact that the sheet of paper has been squared. When drawing motifs that he intended to transpose into another medium or into a more detailed version, Friedrich would often apply squaring to the paper while also numbering the individual squares above and below. Sure enough, several numbers are faintly visible on the upper edge of the squaring, particularly a “5“ and a “6” – this despite the fact that careful erasing has occurred along this particular edge, making the paper appear a bit lighter (probably because the squaring was found to interfere somewhat with the image). These clearly legible numbers as well as with the indistinct word (which some read as Fischspeicher or “fish basin”) visible near the middle of the image, below the brown wooden chests on the Elbe’s sandy bank, are entirely consistent with Friedrich’s handwriting.
In his draftsmanship, Friedrich draws a clear distinction between architecture and nature. Architecture is represented with clear, through lines; nature, by contrast, is drawn with interrupted and dashed lines that make natural features, especially bushes and trees, look more “alive.” We can see this particularly clearly when we examine the slope beneath the citadel.
Last but not least, there is the fact that Friedrich did not have a naturally flowing hand: He tended to draw carefully – sometimes hesitantly – so that the shapes sometimes appear awkward at first glance. Take the flat boats by the far riverbank, for example: They are merely hinted at in pencil instead of being fleshed out and painted in water colour. One need merely compare these to the many boat studies found in the artist’s two “Oslo Sketchbooks” from 1815 and 1818. The artist’s hand is also apparent in the bridge arches on the right-hand side, where the water colour is not completed in its entirety. This exploratory drawing process and the striving for perfection in the finally executed version are typical of Friedrich’s art.
In summary, it is safe to say that this water colour expands our understanding of Friedrich’s artistic craft while also fitting in perfectly with his short but intense preoccupation with landscape painting in the years 1824 and 1825.
Werner Busch