The Draughtsman 136 7 Caspar David Friedrich Small Landscape in Circular Format c. 1794 | CAT 2 8 Caspar David Friedrich Landscape with Footbridge c. 1801 | CAT 62 9 Caspar David Friedrich Landscape with Manor House 12 October 1799 | CAT 27 drew the natural arch at the Uttewalder Grund on 28 August 1800 (fig. 4),20 he may already have seen Günther’s version of the same motif. At any rate, the sepia drawing he made based on the sketch (fig. 5) would suggest so, because, like Günther’s etching, it, too, shows two figures reacting to the sight of the rock formation by raising their arms to point at it (fig. 6). A comparison of Friedrich’s sepia drawing with Zingg’s depiction of the Zscherregrund rock formation,21 where an idyllic pastoral scene is glimpsed through the rock arch, makes the contrast between the mighty, lowering rocks and the tiny human figures in Friedrich’s drawing more fully apparent. This proportional exaggeration was not echoed in any of the drawings or prints by the many later artists to visit the Utterwalder Grund, like Carus, Hammer and Johan Christian Dahl. In his painting of the Grund, however, Friedrich’s pupil August Heinrich pursued exaggeration in another direction by reproducing every single sunlit leaf in the greatest possible individual detail.22 LANDSCAPE ETCHINGS AND STUDIES AROUND 1800 Like Günther, Friedrich also tried his hand at etching. While still a student, he had made tiny circular etchings of landscapes with trees (fig.7).23 “Most of Friedrich’s etchings reflect the park theory of the Age of Sentimentalism,” was how Werner Sumowski summed up the conventionalism of Friedrich’s early Dresden etchings. Sumowski pointed to Christian Cai Lorenz Hirschfeld’s Theory of Garden Art and such etchings series as Johann Adolph Darnstedt’s Views from the Seifersdorf Valley of 1793 as emblematic works of the period and highlighted the “stylistic borrowing from Hackert’s Rügen landscapes and Veith’s vedute” in Friedrich’s etchings (fig. 8).24 Technically, in landscape etching, the young Friedrich was experimenting with a medium with an illustrious tradition in Saxony, its exponents including Samuel Bottschild, Johann Alexander Thiele, Charles François Hutin, Bernardo Bellotto, Adam Friedrich Oeser, Adrian Zingg, Johann Christian Klengel and Christoph Nathe. Indeed, Thiele and Bellotto had produced whole series of etchings.25 Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn dabbled in the technique, while Dietrich, Klengel and Nathe all left large numbers of etched works.26 Their guides to the art of landscape etching had been the masters of the previous century, such as Rembrandt, Alaert van Everdingen, Jacob van Ruisdael, Herman van Swanevelt, Anthonie Waterloo and Jan Both. With their technical virtuosity and artistic freedom, Klengel’s landscape etchings were, in turn, an important inspiration for later peintre-graveurs. In the case of Zingg’s technique of washed outline etching, a whole workshop eventually ensured the production of a swelling stream of pic9 7 8
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