When talking about the history of open-air painting in general, Italy and France are normally regarded as the forerunners,255 but remarkable steps were taken in this field in other European countries, as we will see later in this study in relation to Düsseldorf.256 However, earlier landscapists, such as Claude Lorrain, focused mainly on painting the middle ground and
back-254 Stafford 1984, 4–5.
255 The Swedish art historian Torsten Gun-narsson, who has studied the history of open-air painting in Scandinavia, men-tions Albrecht Dürer’s Landscape from South Tyrol (1495) as one of the earliest examples of landscape studies in water-colour. He also assumes that making stud-ies in oil was probably more common in seventeenth-century Italy than was previ-ously thought. As proof of this, he men-tions the painter’s box, its structure and how it was used. The painter’s box as such seems to have remained much the same, and it was also widely used in Düsseldorf, which will be discussed in chapter four.
In his investigation, Gunnarsson makes a clear distinction between studies in wa-tercolour and oil. Gunnarsson 1989, 21, 26.
256 In France, there are two famous exam-ples to be mentioned. Firstly, Alexandre-François Desportes (1661–1743) who had already painted in the open air during the first decade of the eighteenth century, and made studies of plants by a river and a pond, as well as of clouds, including the effect of light at sunset. In addition, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750−1819), who is usually mentioned as the forerunner of French open-air painting, made studies of nature outdoors, both in Brittany and Italy in the 1770s and 1780s. Valenciennes, moreover, took great interest in the de-piction of natural light. In the following century, outdoor painting gained firmer ground when Camille Corot (1796–1875) studied landscapes both in Italy and, along with a group of other French artists, in Barbizon, before the dawn of Impres-sionism. In contrast to other European countries, outdoor sketching and painting in France developed from the academy tradition to a great extent. Holsten 2002a, 14, 25; Andrews 1999, 190−191; Galassi 1991, 11−39; Gunnarsson 1989, 34, 36; For the French academy tradition, see also Albert Boime’s extensive study The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (1971), and chapters VII–VIII concerning landscape painting in particular, as well as the corresponding terminology. Galassi also resorts to Boime’s terminology in his research on Corot’s outdoor painting in Italy.
4 c A S PA r DAV I D f r I E D r I c H Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, c. 1818 oil on canvas
94.8 x 74.8 cm
© SHk/Hamburger kunsthalle/bpk
Photo: Elke Walford
ground, but in the course of the eighteenth century, the nature of outdoor studies changed due to a different approach in terms of space and time.257 Consequently, artists also started to depict in detail the foreground which stood right in front of them. The German scholar Werner Busch claims that this led to the development of an autonomous oil study at this time.258 Fur-thermore, a number of pioneers painted landscapes in watercolour and oil in the 1770s and 1780s in Britain. Because of the rapidity of execution in
water-257 For the classical composition of land-scape, see, for instance, Bätschmann 2007, 57–61.
258 Busch 1983, 127–128.
77 A rT I S T I c E X P E D I T I O N S A N D l A N D S c A P E A E S T H E T I c S
259 In the 1770s, the English artist Thomas Jones (1742−1803) made studies of clouds, as well as practised how to sketch a distant and hilly landscape. While in Italy, Jones also painted studies of his living quarters, such as a view of his kitchen. Later in the following century, there were several English painters who cherished the tradition further: John Constable and William Turner were the most famous, but along with them were, for instance, the Varley brothers, John (1778–1842) and Cornelius (1781–1873), and their circle.
Also Constable used to leave the foreground relatively free in his early studies. Busch 1983, 130–131; Klonk 1996, 101–147.
260 In Munich, for instance, Johann Christian Reinhart (1761–
1847) and Johann Georg von Dillis (1759–1841) experiment-ed with outdoor studies both in Italy and Germany. Dillis, for example, was so inspired by Valeciennes’s cloud studies in Italy that he started to practise painting them on his re-turn to Germany. Gunnarsson 1989, 32−33; Busch 1994, 280.
For the history of open-air painting in oil 1800–50, see, for instance, Gunnarsson 2002, passim. 34−41.
261 From Austria, the best known is Ferdinand Georg Waldmül-ler (1793–1865), and in Denmark, the artists of its Golden Age, such as Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Christen Købke and Johan Thomas Lundbye (1818–1848), practised outdoor painting, Eckersberg being said to have been the first Nordic artist to paint directly from nature. In Sweden, Gustaf Wilhelm Palm was one of the local pioneers who travelled to Italy to paint quite large-scale oil studies in the Roman Campagna. Gunnarsson 1989, 41, 55, 245–246.
262 Among the visitors were, for instance, Friedrich Schiller (1759−1805), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756−91), Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772−1801), aka Novalis, August Wilhelm Schlegel and his brother Friedrich Schlegel, Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), Goethe, the brothers Alex-ander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the Norwegian-born naturalist and philosopher Henrik Steffens. Klieme &
Neidhardt 2008, 21, 24.
263 Howoldt 2003, 85.
264 For the relationship of Romanticism and Friedrich’s art, see Koerner 2009 [1990], 29–36.
265 In the Harz, for instance, Friedrich sketched the outline of the undulating landscape on 25 June 1811, and depicted a marble excavation in a pencil drawing on 26 June 1811.
Then he continued studying the same motif the following day, this time composing it in pencil and in watercolour.
Later, in his studio, Friedrich used the sketches and studies for composing his landscapes in oils, such as the Felsen
schlucht, which represents the same marble excavation on a larger scale, or he just included them as details in the finished pictures; for the artworks of the marble excava-tion, see Zschoche 2000, 49, 51, 55, 88; for the other motifs, see No. NG.K&H.B.16030, NMO; No. C 1937–417, KK, and also Kuhlmann-Hodick & Spitzer 2014, 97.
266 For Koerner’s analysis of Friedrich’s artwork in general, see Koerner 2009 [1990], 210–228.
colour, oil painting in the open air also became less formal and approximated the mode of watercolour sketching.259 Drawing and painting studies directly from nature was, in effect, quite a common practice in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and artists in Germany,260 Austria and the Nordic countries started to practise it too.261
Although Dresden is not the main focus of this study, it is essential to discuss its role in the development of German outdoor painting. As stated earlier, Dresden served as a stage for German Romanticism around 1800, and an animated discussion on the topic existed between artists and scientists at that time. Many artists, poets, naturalists and philosophers gathered in the city, and the literary and musical salon of the German lawyer Christian Gottfried Körner (1756−1831) attracted many of them, in-cluding Alexander von Humboldt and Henrik Steffens.262 One of the artists whose works the Romantics praised as containing the visual embodiments of their ideas was Caspar David Friedrich, who stated that the artist was supposed to depict his soul and his feelings.263 Granted that Friedrich has been described as a ‘quintessentially Ro-mantic painter’ by Joseph Leo Koerner in his Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape,264 it is still intriguing to examine his artworks and studies from a Humboldtian point of view. And even though we cannot say that Frie-drich would have been impressed by Humboldt’s ideas directly, his artworks tell us about his interest in studying natural phenomena in the open air.
Friedrich eagerly sketched trees, rocks and mountains from nature on his trips along the Elbe and in the Harz mountain region, as well as in Rügen and Bohemia, taking note of the same things mentioned by Humboldt.265 For the same reason, we can detect certain details and connect them with real places in the Elbe val-ley when we look at his Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, 1818).266 Friedrich’s paint-ing, nevertheless, does not represent a true-to-life view
as seen when standing on the rock, but rather a collection of different geological phenomena that Friedrich placed looming amidst the fog. There, for instance, the rock the man is standing on is still to be found in the same place. Also, the view open-ing up in front of him consists of geological details that can be spotted along the way, such as the rugged sandstone tops of Elbe Sandstone Mountains (Elbsteingebirge) smoothed out by the weather, or the top of the rock wall at the Bastei situat-ed just before him, or the sloping basalt mountain-tops amidst the fog – and even the protruding tops of the Rosenstein on the left and the Zirkelstein on the right.267 Therefore, it is very tempting to suggest that, in this picture, Friedrich not only de-picted his inner soul, but also very concrete features which he – the wanderer, or the halted traveller, as Koerner calls him – had seen surrounding him while walking in the Elbe valley.268 More precisely, it explains the observations he had made. The geological details in the picture not only refer to real places in the Elbe valley, but also to Earth’s history, and thus to different geological processes that had taken place there. In fact, Frie-drich learnt about geognosy from his friend Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert (1780–1860), who was a physician and naturalist by profession, and had been Abraham Gottlob Werner’s student in Freiberg.269 Friedrich’s interest was not limited to geognosy only, but later in his career, in the 1820s, he took a special in-terest in the study of natural phenomena in the sky, and this was sparked off by his friends and colleagues Johan Christian Clausen Dahl and Carl Gustav Carus.270