“There is also a rather beautiful large landscape here by Prof. Friedrich,” wrote the Literarische Conversations-Blatt on the occasion of the Dresden Academy exhibition of 1825: “a lonely, mountainous region. The different shades of the higher mountain regions are excellently depicted; in the foreground, between towering blocks of basalt, grass, and small trees manage to push their way through; higher up, mist is drawn around the barren mountain ridges; at the very top, mountain peaks covered with eternal snow shimmer in unclouded clarity. There is something terrible about the utter loneliness here; one longs to see at least an eagle or a chamois, but in vain—no life is to be found here but that of air and light; every pulsation of feeling stalls at this altitude!“ (1)

Caspar David Friedrich never visited the Alps, yet he painted several views of this mountain range. He used various models for the composition of his painting The Watzmann(2). Central to his work was a watercolor study of the summit that his pupil August Heinrich captured on location. He also used his own sketches from his journey through the Harz Mountains. The motif of the rock formation in the middle of the foreground is based on drawings of the Trudenstein on the Hohnekopf, not far from the Brocken, made on June 28, 1811. (3)

Friedrich had already presented a large-format landscape in Dresden in 1824. The painting depicted a view of Mont Blanc. (4) As with the Watzmann, a work by another artist served as a model, in this case a drawing by Carl Gustav Carus. Friedrich probably painted his Watzmann in response to a work by the twenty-three-year-old Ludwig Richter showing the same peak, which was exhibited in Dresden in 1824: (5) he rejected detailed, narrative depictions of this kind.

In Friedrich’s painting, the glacial mountain bathed in bright light, embodying the grandeur and immensity of nature, seems distant and rapturous, like a symbol of divine majesty. No living creature can be seen in the solitude of this high mountain landscape. The pyramidal composition culminates in the radiant white of the eternal ice, a pictorial idea that Friedrich had already developed two years earlier in his famous painting The Sea of Ice. Eberhard Hanfstaengl, who acquired The Watzmann for the Berlin Nationalgalerie in 1937, admired Friedrich’s “pictorial and poetic power … with which he brings his own and other people’s images of nature into an imaginatively heightened form that dispenses with all that is veduta-like to become the epitome of mountain depiction.“ (6)

Birgit Verwiebe, in: exh. cat. Hamburg 2023, p. 190.

(1) Anonymous 1825, p. 888; also cited by Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, p. 106.
(2) Ibid., pp. 397 f., no. 330. See also Mitchell 1984; exh. cat. Berlin 2004; Grave 2023, pp. 184–99, esp. pp. 196 f.
(3) The Trudenstein in the Harz, June 28, 1811, pencil, 25.7 × 36 cm, 25.6 × 35 cm, whereabouts of both unknown; Grummt 2011, vol. 2, p. 623, no. 643, and pp. 631 f., no. 653.
(4) High Mountains, oil on canvas, 131 × 167 cm, formerly Nationalgalerie Berlin, wartime loss; Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, pp. 391 f., no. 317.
(5) The Watzmann, 1824, oil on canvas, 121 × 93.5 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich.
(6) Hanfstaengl 1937, p. 223.