A carriage ride to Teplice

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.