A Gothic brick building and two studies of trees

The towering figure in 19th Century German painting, Friedrich was also a prolific draughtsman, by whom a very substantial number of sheets survive. Few important drawings remain in private hands, however, and the rediscovery of this unpublished example is a valuable addition to his œuvre. The drawing belongs to a group of nearly twenty studies on loose sheets (Loseblattsammlung), in which Friedrich focuses on trees and Gothic architecture in the surroundings of his birthplace Greifswald, in Northern Germany (C. Grummt, Caspar David Friedrich. Die Zeichnungen, Munich, 2011, II, nos. 579-595, ill.). All are dated between April and July 1809, when the artist visited his family, mainly to see his father, who had been ill for more than a year. As the artist’s own inscriptions indicate, the studies of trees were made on 14 June, the day of his father’s recovery, in Breesen, near Neubrandenburg, where (as a family letter informs us) his father had retired ‘to become healthy again by taking walks’ (ibid., p. 546). Nearly two months before, on 18 April, shortly after arriving at Greifswald, Friedrich made the study of a building in the upper half of the sheet, probably a house, characteristic for the region’s Gothic architecture. Drawing carefully from life, he subtly clarified its structure and materials by adding light brown washes, probably at home. (At upper right he had first tried out his brush after dipping it in the ink). The inscription at lower right is due to the great Norwegian painter Johan Christian Dahl, a friend of Friedrich who owned a large number of his works. Although not made as independent works of art, studies such as these, like Friedrich’s best pictures, show him both as an artist capable of close observation, and one finding a spiritual quality in the beauty of the world surrounding him.