The Oslo Sketchbook of 1807

On long hikes, Caspar David Friedrich compiled many sketchbooks. The ‘Oslo Sketchbook of 1807’ records trees he would use in many paintings.

The art of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), mysterious and spiritual as it was, depended on an intense engagement with nature. On the long hikes that he took through his native north Germany, and further south in the Bohemian mountains, he drew landscapes, buildings, people and, most intently of all perhaps, trees. Half of Friedrich’s surviving drawi...