Crola-The Brocken on a May Morning

Georg Heinrich Crola (1804-1879) lived in Dresden for three years beginning in 1825. That same year he became a student of Johan Christian Clausen Dahl (1788-1857), and two years later took lessons from Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), as well. Dahl and Friedrich were both landscape painters, and although marked visual differences exist between their two styles, they both agreed on the same general principles of landscape, namely that landscape is not simply a rendering of nature, but also of one’s own feelings about nature. However, these conceptions of nature, and the emotions inspired by nature, were different.[i] For Friedrich, these emotions went beyond the quotidian experience. Rather, they relate directly to the Romantic notions of the sublime and the union of the self with the divine that the viewer experiences upon looking at the landscape.[ii] Dahl on the other hand, placed more emphasis on the naturalism of the landscape. The emotions inspired by scenes of nature were not those of the Romantic sublime, but rather of a vitality of nature.[iii]

Crola drew influences from both of his teachers, and his work tended to occupy a midpoint between Dahl and Friedrich, emphasizing the naturalism of the landscape, but at times also striving toward the divine. Thus, while the landscape in The Brocken on a May Morning has been rendered realistically—the trees, bushes, and mountains all very truthful to nature—the brushstrokes suggesting a precision in his depiction, the placement of a tiny hunter in profile, his gun slung over his shoulder lends nature a sense of grandeur and vastness bordering on the infinite. Crola’s use of a figure partly turned away from the viewer seems to derive from one of the most distinctive characteristics of Friederich’s work, what Joseph Koerner terms the Rückenfigur.[iv] Establishing the scale of the landscape, the Rückenfigur also declares the landscape “worth seeing” by mimicking the spectator’s act of viewing.[v] Although the hunter is not a Rückenfigur per se, standing in profile rather than with his back directly toward the viewer, the basic functions that Koerner outlines are still applicable. By placing the diminutive figure of the hunter in the foreground, Crola has dramatized the act of viewing, engaging in the eye. This effect is reinforced by the addition of the path that winds through the foreground, leading the eye to the hunter, who almost swallowed up by this landscape, overshadowed by the mountains, evokes nature’s grandeur.

The mountains that dominate the painting emotionally and visually, occupying half of the drawing at its peak. That Crola has chosen to focus on the mountains to reinforce their immensity through the addition of the tiny hunter ties directly into the ideas of geognosy in nineteenth-century Germany. Its main, and most famous, proponent was the geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner, who had classified the mountains into five categories. As the oldest mountain formation, the Urgebirge were believed to form the highest mountain peaks, placing them foremost in the minds of Romantic theorists and artists alike. For it was from the highest mountains that the human being could command the most awe-inspiring view that would bring him closer to unification with the divine and the sublime. Geognosy was so widely well known that two of Friedrichs paintings are informed by it: Der Watzmann (Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussicher Kulturbesitz, 1825) and Die Hochgebirge (formerly Berlin, Nationalgalerie, 1824, destroyed 1945).[vi]

Presumably, as one of Friedrich’s students, Crola would have been familiar with his works, especially as Der Watzmann, the more scientific of the two, was completed the same year that Crola arrived.[vii] Furthermore, Friedrich, and to a lesser extent Dahl, were good friends with Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869), himself a student of geognosy as well as an artist. In fact, in 1820, he had exhibited two geognostic paintings in Weimar, both favorably reviewed by the pre-eminent German thinker of the time, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.[viii] It is no coincidence that the drawing in which the mountains dominate, in which Crola has gone to pains to render every tree on the mountainsides and the geography of the mountain in the foreground, is also of one of the most famous examples of the Urgebirge—the Brocken, the highest mountain in the Harz. Crola is here so steeped in naturalism that he has even depicted the observation tower barely visible at the top of the mountain. Furthermore, the date of the watercolor, 1829, places it during Crola’s own two-year trip through the Harz.

Just before Crola had arrived in Dresden, Carus had published his Nine Letters on Landscape Painting. Carus greatly admired Friedrich’s work, but he also placed great importance on naturalism, as is evident in his Nine Letters. According to Carus, both science and art led to the divine, for “From awareness comes knowledge, or science; and from skill comes art. In science, man feels himself in God; in art, he feels God in himself.”[ix] Perhaps the most striking idea in the Nine Letters is the use of Erdlebenbild or Erdlebenbildkunst (earth-life painting, earth-life art), a new term that Carus coined to express his idea of an ideal landscape; that is, a landscape that expresses the sublime as well as the naturalism necessary to render it truthfully. Simply depicting nature was not enough to qualify as an Erdlebenbild. An artist must express the history and structure of mountains through their form (geognosy), as well as paint the other elements of the scene in such a manner that it reveals the laws of nature inherent in their form.[x] Because Carus’s demands were so lofty, by the time he published his letters, he had not yet identified a painter that was creating Erdlebenbildkunst. The earliest example he mentions is in 1833, when he praises a work by Crola as a “meaningful and purely made scene of earth-life.”[xi]

Despite Crola having painted this watercolor four years before Carus made this comment, Crola’s interest in expressing the history and structure of the mountains and the natural forms of the trees and ground is already evident. Nor was Crola the only artist to be captivated by the Harz mountains, and the Brocken in particular. Goethe had made several trips to the Harz at the end of the eighteenth century, fascinated, it seems by the size and age, and composition (wrongly thought to be granite) of the Harz, considered by geognosy to be Urgebirge. “On Granite,” written in 1784, apotheosizes the Harz, evoking the sentiments of awe and the sublime that would manifest themselves visually in Romantic landscapes:

Informed by geognosy, it is not surprising that Goethe also made a drawing during one of his trips, depicting the Brocken (The Brocken, Weimar, Goethe Nationalmuseum), the highest of the Urgebirge, the very same mountain that would move Crola to draw it over thirty years later. The sentiments evoked both in “On Granite’ and Goethe’s drawing are the same, and are echoed by those in Crola—of an awe in the face of nature and the sublime, and a desire for truth to nature, but a truth mixed always with the divine.

[i] Marie Lødrup Bang, Johan Christian Dahl 1788-1857, Life and Works, vol. 1 (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1987), 83. For Friedrich’s obituary notes, Dahl wrote that “Friedrich wusste und fühlte recht wohl, dass man nicht die Natur selber malt, oder malen kann, sondern die eigenen Empfindungen,“ but that these renderings of natue must neverless “natürlich sein.” Ibid.

[ii] For a discussion of Friedrich and the sublime, see Iain Boyd Whyte, “The Sublime,” in Keith Hartley, et al, eds. The Romantic Spirit in German Art 1790-1990, (Edinburgh: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 1994),138-140. See also Brad Prager, “Kant in Caspar David Friedrich’s Frames,” in Art History 25, no. 1 (Feb 2002): 68-86.

[iii] As he stated in a letter to his friend Lyder Sagen, “The painter, being a true point…must strive after, and guide others to, a truthful and improved representation of nature. A landscape painting must do more than conjure up a certain land or region, it must reflect the true character of the land and its natural features; it must strike a poetic chord in the sensitive viewer and must convey to him the nature of the country, its architecture, its people and customs, in images varying from the idyllic to melancholic retrospectives of its history.” Quoted in Peter Wegmann, Caspar David Friedrich to Ferdinand Hodler: A Romantic Tradition, Nineteenth-Century Paintings and Drawings from the Oskar Reinhart Foundation, Winterthur, ed. and trans. Margarita Russell, exh. cat. (Berlin: Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin: 1993), 91.

[iv] In fact, Crola’s works from early on in his lessons from Friedrich show an interest in the Rückenfigur, which he utilizes in precisely the same manner as his teacher.

[v] Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 163.

[vi] Timothy Mitchell, “Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Watzmann: German Romantic Landscape Painting and Historical Geology,” Art Bulletin 66, no. 3 (Sept 1984): 452-464.

[vii] Even though Crola would not begin taking lessons for two more years, he had begun lessons with Dahl in 1825. As Dahl and Friedrich lived in the same house in Dresden, it is logical that Crola would have been exposed to works by both artists beginning in 1825.

[viii] The two works were entitled Memory of the Sandstone Mountain Range (1819) and Geognostic Landscape: Katzenköpfe near Zittau (1820). Goethe reviewed both in his periodical, Über Kunst und Altertum. Oskar Bätschmann, “Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869): Physician, Naturalist, Painter, and Theoretician of Landscape Painting,” in Carl Gustav Carus, Nine Letters on Landscape Painting, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2002), 8.

[ix] Carus, “Letter III,” Nine Letters 90.

[x] Carus, “Letter VIII,” Nine Letters 128-131.

[xi] Carl Gustav Carus, “Über eine Landschaft (Erdlebenbild) von Crola in München,” Kunst-Blatt 43 (28 May 1833): 170.

[xii] Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, “On Granite,” in vol. 12, Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller. (NY: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988), 132. The Harz exerted such a strong influence on Goethe that he also wrote a poem entitled, “Harzreise im Winter.”