A true sensation: Caspar David Friedrich’s Karlsruher Skizzenbuch von 1804 will headline the November 30th sale at Grisebach – the very first time one of his sketchbooks will be offered at auction. 

Grisebach is delighted to present Caspar David Friedrich’s Karlsruher Skizzenbuch von 1804 – the very first time a complete sketchbook by the artist will be offered at auction. It is the last of the known sketchbooks to be in private hands. Of the twenty bound sketchbooks that probably existed, only six survive. Four of them, are held by the National Museum in Oslo, while a fifth forms part of the collection of the Kupferstichkabinett in Dresden. Created between 1802 and 1806 – a period regarded as the most important years for the artist’s creative development – their pages regal the viewer with a wealth of visual impressions Friedrich recorded during his walks through Dresden and its surroundings.

From April 25th until June 1st, 1804, this was the sketchbook the artist would slip into the pockets of his travelling coat again and again. It is referred to as the Karlsruher Skizzenbuch because that is the city where it was held ever since passing into the hands of Georg Friedrich Kersting during Friedrich’s lifetime or shortly after his death. Kersting was a fellow painter and close friend who created the most important portraits of Caspar David Friedrich (№ 1). His descendants have preserved the sketchbook in their private collection for nearly two centuries.

Drawings record the origins of the inspiration for later paintings. This holds particularly true for Caspar David Friedrich, the “inventor of the symbolist landscape,” as the Dresden art historian Hans Joachim Neidhardt put it. An uncompromising innovator of German landscape painting, Friedrich played a key role in the dawning of European Romanticism, the harbinger, better yet: the radical manifestation of the paradigm shift that would culminate in Modernism. These drawings afford us the most intimate insights into the thoughts and imagination of an epochally seminal artist seeking to conceive his images. What was it that caught his attention? Which motifs did he select, what sections did he choose for his work? “The sketchbook allows us to see through Friedrich’s own eyes: lone trees and copses, trunks drawn as if dissected by his pencil, delicate landscapes and village vistas, distant horizons and broad expanses, careful studies of ships and clouds and birds on the wing.” (Anna Ahrens, Head of Department 19th Century Art at Grisebach)

The Karlsruher Skizzenbuch accompanied Friedrich nearly his entire life. Even years later, he would return to it, transferring motifs into his painted worlds. One of them is the famous oak tree on page 9, which he used in three of his main works: In the left foreground of the early Hünengrab im Schnee (№ 2) (1806/7, Dresden State Art Collections), to the right of the ruin in Abtei im Eichwald (№ 3) (1809/10, Berlin State Museums, Old National Gallery). Several pages of the „Karlsruher Skizzenbuch“ refer to Das große Gehege bei Dresden (№ 4) (Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden), Friedrich’s important late work from 1832. On sketchbook page 28, for example, we already discover the characteristic rhythmic rows of trees, and the preparatory drawing for the sailing barge is found on page 24. In summary, we are looking at an object whose significance for the artist’s creative process can hardly be exagerated.