Foggy Russian graveyard

Details

Ausstellung:
Caspar David Friedrich und Umkreis, Galerie Hans, Hamburg 2006, Kat.-Nr. 32, mit Abb.

Provenienz:
Galerie Hans, Hamburg, verso mit dem Sammlerstempel von Mathias F. Hans (vgl. Lugt 5924);
Grisebach, Berlin, Auktion, 31.5.2017, Los 125;
Privatsammlung, Deutschland.

Description

A blue-grey veil of mist lies over the graves in the hollows of the cemetery grounds. The grave crosses – one bent over like a rotten tree – are bathed in a diffuse light by the sun, whose rays are swallowed up by the haze. According to Werner Sumowski, this atmospheric landscape can only have been painted by a painter of the subsequent Romantic generation from the circle of Caspar David Friedrich, as it presupposes a knowledge of his style of the 1820s. Sumowski recognises the same hand here as in Carl Julius von Leypold’s “Kirchhofseingang” in the Stadtmuseum im Fembo-Haus, Nuremberg (inv. no. Gm 2005) (cf. Werner Sumowski, Caspar David Friedrich und Carl Julius von Leypold, Pantheon XXIX, 1971, p. 501, with illus.). In this composition, too, a foreground with space-forming elements seen close up is followed by a “foggy space”, conceived as impenetrable and wandering into infinity. Leypold may have painted this motif for a Russian patron. The Russian poet Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky (1783-1852), for example, who was an important patron of Caspar David Friedrich and also cultivated contacts with other Dresden painters.