As museum director in Zwickau and head of the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Dr Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895-1956) was repeatedly rejected in conservative circles. This was due to the fact that he favoured modern art. When he was forced to step down in 1933, he switched to the art trade. Despite his Jewish origins, he soon became one of the most influential dealers in the Nazi state. Against the backdrop of the Degenerate Art campaign of 1937, he was authorised to sell confiscated works. In 1943, he became the main buyer for the Special Commissioner of Linz in occupied France.

The museum acquired three paintings from Gurlitt in Dresden in 1943, including Balthasar Denner’s Elderly Woman and Ferdinand von Rayski’s Gustav Baron von Normann. In Gurlitt's account books, the previous owner of these paintings is listed as the art dealer Theo Hermsen, Paris. However, it is likely that they had long been in Gurlitt's possession. Had an import from France been faked to obtain foreign currency?

“I have also now finished the painting, Ulysses with Penelope (...) and no matter how often I look at it, I always think it would be perfect for the young royal couple, who love each other so dearly and occupy themselves so nobly, and preserve themselves for each other.”

Letters written by artists - such as Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein (1751-1829) in 1810 - can provide clues to previous owners: Peter I Friedrich Ludwig, Duke of Oldenburg, gave the painting Ulysses and Penelope, 1810 to his son Prince George and his wife Catherine Pavlovna, Grand Duchess of Russia, who resided in St Petersburg.

The journey of the painting led from Eutin, via Oldenburg and St. Petersburg to Stuttgart. After George's death, Catherine married the future King Wilhelm I of Württemberg in 1816. In 1921, the Stuttgart court art dealer Felix Fleischhauer submitted it for auction to Hugo Helbing of Munich. In 1922, the Munich gallery Heinemann sold it to a buyer in Hamburg. The new owner was presumably the Hamburg metal exporter Jacob Hirsch (1883-1933), who emigrated to Paris in 1932 and died there. In 1942, the Nicolai Gallery in Berlin offered the painting to the Dortmund Museum.

The painting shows a gently undulating snowy landscape in which a group of fir trees rises up before a wall of pale grey mist. In front of it a few boulders are scattered. An old man has thrown aside his crutches and is seated. His face and hands are raised in prayer to a crucifix. A Gothic cathedral looms in the background. It rises like a vision out of the dense fog into the evening glow of the sky.

Caspar David Friedrich painted Winter Landscape in 1811. The painting is oil on canvas and measures 33 x 45 cm. 

The painting was first described in 1811. The Dresden painter Gustav Heinrich Naeke (1786-1835) saw two paintings by Caspar David Friedrich in 1811. He mentioned the counterparts in a letter to the Leipzig lawyer and art collector Ludwig Puttrich.

Friederike Tugendreich Volkmann of Leipzig also saw the two pictures and described them in her diary on 22 June 1811.

They were also mentioned in the Journal des Luxus und der Moden in 1812, 1813 and 1814.

In 1817, Winter Landscape was even honoured with an entry in the Brockhaus Conversation Lexicon, published in Leipzig.

The counterpart painting is now in the Schwerin State Museum. The Ministry of Finance had transferred it to the Schwerin Museum in 1941. Its provenance has not yet been established.

One Winter Landscape had become part of the collection of the Leipzig lawyer Ludwig Puttrich (1783-1856) by 1813 at the latest.

The ecclesiastical lawyer of the Upper Court was not only interested in paintings, but also in architecture. In 1835-1852, he published the work Denkmale der Baukunstdes Mittelalters in Sachsen. Puttrich was in correspondence with Caspar David Friedrich and exchanged ideas with art historians and art enthusiasts of his time.

Puttrich's art collection was auctioned in Leipzig in 1850, in London in 1856 and in Munich in 1857. Nothing is known about the painting's subsequent journey. However, it is speculated that it made its way to Silesia.

Museum assistant Leonie Reygers had allegedly acquired the painting for the Museum of Art and Cultural History in a castle in Teplice in Bohemia. A search for the location was therefore carried out in 1990, but in vain. In 2018, the theory emerged that it could have been a Silesian castle in the Hirschberg Valley.

As early as the 18th century, this region became a place of pilgrimage for artists and nature-loving travellers. Caspar David Friedrich and his fellow painter Georg Kersting also travelled here in 1810, as the Schneekoppe tourist register attests. After Silesia became a Prussian province in 1815, the Hohenzollerns acquired castles in the Hirschberg valley. The Prussian nobility followed suit.

The castles in the Hirschberg Valley were appropriately furnished with valuable paintings. Was Winter Landscape possibly in Fischbach Castle, the summer residence of Prince Wilhelm of Prussia and his wife Princess Marianne? The king's brother was a passionate art collector. Upon his death, his children inherited the castle. His daughter Elisabeth, who was married to the Landgraf of Hesse and Rhine, wanted to preserve the castle in memory of her parents. Like a museum, visitors could view it for a fee. An eyewitness reported, “In the Red Hall hung a painting of a pilgrim at a cross.” Could this be Winter Landscape? However, no painting by Friedrich is mentioned in the inventories.

In midsummer 1941, numerous German-language newspapers in Germany and abroad reported on the activities in Dortmund: “Dortmund is to get a picture gallery. (...) The collection has already been commenced.”

Although the Second World War prevented the construction of a dedicated building, more than 20 paintings were added to the museum's collection. One of the most important new acquisitions was Winter Landscape by Caspar David Friedrich in 1942, which was purchased from the Dresden art dealer Paul Rusch. It cost 85,000 Reichsmarks.

The Rusch art dealership existed from 1920 to 1945 at various locations in Dresden. It was completely destroyed during air raids in February 1945. No business documents have survived.

Paul Rusch (d. 1953) was already dealing in works by Caspar David Friedrich in the 1920s. He had close ties to the Dresden Picture Gallery and its director Dr Hans Posse (1879-1942). In 1939, Posse became a special commissioner for the construction of a huge art museum in Linz.  The Linz Special Commission was an unofficial organisation and reported directly to Hitler.

The Dresden art dealer Paul Rusch sold the Dortmund Winter Landscape between 1940 and 1942. It can be assumed that the painting was not his property at this time, but that he was looking for a buyer on behalf of an as yet unknown person. Paul Rusch discovered the painting in an unknown private collection and initially offered it to the Linz Special Commission in the summer of 1940. Hans Posse declined to buy it and noted in his diary on 16 August 1940:

“Rusch with CD Friedrich, Winter Landscape with cross, cathedral in the fog, man with discarded crutches; on the reverse Friedrich 1811 in his own hand; not suitable for us.”

Rusch offered it to the National Gallery in Berlin on 16 March 1941. However, the purchasing commission turned it down due to its price of 85,000 Reichsmarks.

The provenance of the painting has not yet been established. Since the second Winter Landscape came to light, the provenance of the Dortmund painting from the Ludwig Puttrich Collection has been called into question. This is because the London painting could also have been located there.

Dr Wilhelm August Luz (1892-1959) was one of the most prominent art dealers in the Reich’s capital, Berlin. His gallery specialised in paintings from the Romantic period. Adolf Hitler was one of his customers, as was Dr Hans Posse, the Special Commissioner in charge of setting up the Hitler Museum in Linz. Luz had good relations with the Berlin National Gallery and also supplied many German museums with 19th century art. Initially, he offered his paintings at favourable prices. However, the Second World War caused his prices to skyrocket, although this did not dampen the museums' eagerness to buy. Between 1939 and 1948 the Dortmund Museum acquired ten paintings for 107,650 Reichsmarks. As the business records of Dr Luz’s Gallery are said to have been incinerated in the post-war period, little is known about the provenance of the paintings.

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After the end of the Second World War, the Allies confiscated the collection of the planned Führer Museum in Linz as well as works of art owned by high-ranking Nazi officials. They interrogated all those involved and began the restitution process. If there was no evidence of unlawful confiscation, they were released as loans to the museums. Numerous paintings, graphic designs, furniture and decorative arts were thus transferred to the Museum of Art and Cultural History.

After Anselm Feuerbach's death, the painting Nanna came into the possession of the Heidelberg medical officer Dr Franz Wolf. It entered the market via his granddaughter in 1935. The photographer Heinrich Hoffmann acquired the painting at the Ludwigs-Galerie in Munich, probably on behalf of Adolf Hitler. There is evidence that it hung in the  sitting room of Hitler's Berghof residence in the Obersalzberg near Berchtesgarden.

From 1933, the Nazis turned their attention to classical modernism. Their smear campaign reached Dortmund in 1935. An exhibition entitled Degenerate Art was staged in the Haus der Kunst featuring paintings by Paul Klee, Georg Grosz and Otto Dix. They intensified their propaganda in 1937 with the Great Anti-Bolshevik Exhibition at the Teacher Training College. Its Cultural Bolshevism section adopted the aesthetics of the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich of the same year. In August 1937, a commission of the Reich Chamber of Culture confiscated 11 paintings, 1 sculpture, 81 graphic works and 25 graphic portfolios from the Museum of Art and Cultural History.

This included the painting The Ruhr Valley near Herdecke, originally entitled Blue Hills. Düsseldorf gallery owner Alfred Flechtheim (1878-1937) had donated it to the Dortmund Museum in 1922. After it was confiscated, the Nazis removed the initials ‘CR’ to make the painting easier to sell. In 1954, it was repurchased by the Ketterer Kunstkabinett in Stuttgart.