HAMBURG.- For the major anniversary exhibitions marking Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th birthday, the HAMBURGER KUNSTHALLE has reframed paintings by the Dresden-based Romantic painter. Yet to this day, we don’t have a conclusive idea of Friedrich’s own thoughts on this matter. All we have so far is theories.

Caspar David Friedrich’s powerfully symbolic and transcendental paintings retain an unfathomable and mysterious quality. Friedrich's framing concept similarly remains a big question mark. Did he have his own ideas, or did he merely adapt to contemporary taste? This is the question the HAMBURGER KUNSTHALLE faced when The Sea of Ice, Friedrich’s highly dramatic shipwreck scene, was to be reframed. The painting from 1822/23 is undoubtedly the most powerful and violent subject in his otherwise tranquil and melancholic oeuvre. The notion of romanticism as a quest for new religiosity and truth in nature is visualized here in the sublimely towering ice floes. The artist was unable to sell this allegory of fate in 1824, when it was included in the Dresden Academy exhibition, and two years later at the Academy Exhibition in Berlin. But this means that it must have had a frame during Friedrich’s lifetime, for no painting could be shown publicly without a frame. His painter friend Johann Christian Clausen Dahl eventually acquired it around 1834, and it remained in Dahl’s family until the HAMBURGER KUNSTHALLE acquired the major work in 1905. A year later it was shown at the Centennial Exhibition of German Art in Berlin, which led to Friedrich being rediscovered and enshrined to this day as the foremost German Romantic artist.

Neutral Cove Molding

It may have been around this time that The Sea of Ice was given the black frame which surrounded it until recently. The period before the First World War was very much wedded to all things historical and preindustrial, which did not include classicism and romanticism. Dark, ebony-like frames in the Baroque style of the Dutch conformed to what was considered tasteful and always suitable. The current decision in favor of gilt cove molding seeks to approximate what may have been Friedrich’s intentions. Between 1800 and 1850, cove molding was the most neutral type of picture frame — more architectural, but not period-specific. In the past it had also been used for Friedrich’s Drifting Clouds, Bohemian Landscape, and Plowed Field. No ornament gives this molding an “ideological” slant. No swan corner ornament evokes the late Empire style that had spilled over from France. No lotus frieze suggests Roman Antiquity. The Greifswald-born painter had no affinity for classicism, and as an advocate of an emerging national consciousness in the course of the German campaign he was most certainly not a supporter of Napoleon.

Today’s Potpourri of Frames

Even though Friedrich suffered the fate of being forgotten for more than half a century after his death, this didn’t necessarily mean that his paintings’ frames fell into a deep slumber from which they were then suddenly awakened in the aforementioned 1906 Berlin exhibition. What is not on display in collections is usually neglected. As a closer look at the dates when Friedrich’s paintings were acquired by German museums reveals, a targeted acquisition policy did not begin until after the First World War. It is difficult to reconstruct what was still available at the time in terms of original frames. Nowadays, museums are obviously making an effort to present Friedrich’s works at least in frames of the period. Sixteen years ago, for example, Munich’s Pinakotheks-Verein acquired a large group of frames from the first half of the nineteenth century in the art trade; intended specifically for the Friedrich paintings in the collection of the NEUE PINAKOTHEK, they were supposed to give them a more authentic look, for their effect on viewers is influenced in no small degree by the way they are framed. Overall, however, the frames surrounding Friedrich’s paintings in museums today offer a disparate picture. “Period frame” is a broad term.

A Variety of Styles

Even in Friedrich’s day, the range of frames was already characterized by a certain stylistic pluralism, which is also reflected in the current frames. Some types of frames, it seems, are predestined for certain art movements and genres and not so much for others. In general, two trends can be identified for nineteenth-century frames: references to antiquity and a tendency towards romantic historicization, which already announced itself around 1800 in hinted-at neo-Gothic forms. The gamut of decorative elements ranges from ornaments based on ancient models such as kymation and palmette friezes to Empire influences such as corner ornaments with bold scrollwork to the Biedermeier-style use of native plant motifs with patriotic connotations, such as oak or vine leaves and forget-me-nots.

It goes without saying which trend is closer to the work of the Dresden romantic. After all, Friedrich’s is a visual world in which landscapes are combined with religious symbolism, in which figures in back view become a reflection on existence and the grandeur of nature turns into a mystical allegory of life, death and the afterlife, as in The Tombs of the Old Heroes.

These plunge the eye into boundless depth. Any molding with a profile rising on the outside will additionally draw the gaze into the compositions’ spatial depths. But his visual world is at the same time the opposite of any classicist vedute, any Bourgeois portrait with an Enlightenment slant and the richness of contemporaneous paintings of Italian scenery. Moldings referencing antiquity or featuring late Empire scrollwork and the sometimes overly ornamental acanthus and lotus friezes may frame the romantic spirit of Friedrich’s subjects appropriately for the period, but they do not really serve the silent correspondence between picture and frame.

The Cathedral, Museum Georg Schäfer

The reframing of Friedrich’s The Cathedral (c. 1818) at MUSEUM GEORG SCHÄFER in Schweinfurt offers a compelling example of a reconstruction of what the original frame is believed to have looked like. Depicting a Gothic house of worship in a cloudy haze, the painting is expressive of Friedrich’s deep connection to religion and at the same time illustrative of his identification of Christian faith with the Gothic style – an identification additionally underscored by the pointed arch shape, which is evocative of a medieval church window and imitates the profile of brick window trim. The work was previously encased in plain, gilt cove molding. Based on an illustration accompanying an essay by Hildegard Heyne in the magazine PANTHEON in 1963, a frame with multi-offset baguette profile and trefoil rosettes was reconstructed, which enhances the overall romantic impression. Georg Schäfer bought the work at the time from an elderly lady in Leipzig, whose great-grandfather had allegedly acquired it from Friedrich himself. It is quite possible that it was still in its original frame in the 1960s. According to Heyne, the nailed-on decoration was made of metal. As recent research into the SPECK VON STERNBURG COLLECTION, which was incorporated into the LEIPZIG MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS after the Second World War, has shown, frames with affixed lead decorations were quite common in Leipzig. Especially paintings Speck von Sternburg acquired between 1815 and 1826 were framed in this way. It seems rather unlikely, however, that Caspar David Friedrich had any personal influence on the Cathedral’s “Leipzig-type” frame with metal ornaments.

The Tetschen Altar as a Total Work of Art

The altar-like frame of Cross in the Mountains from 1807/08, also known as the Tetschen Altar, is the only confirmed frame based on what Friedrich had envisaged. Today it is in the NEW MASTERS GALLERY of the DRESDEN STATE ART COLLECTIONS. This early painting by Friedrich marked a break with the conventions of landscape painting as well as traditional Christian iconography and opened a window into Romantic painting: a crucifix on a rock, surrounded by spruces reaching for the sky, against the light of the setting sun. Friedrich was aiming for a total work of art, a unity of content comprising painting and frame. He would never have a chance to do this again, because he would not be commissioned to create such a work where, moreover, location and purpose were specified like they were for the Tetschen Altar. Count Thun-Hohenstein had commissioned it from Friedrich as a private devotional picture for the castle chapel in what is now Děčín in the Czech Republic. The work gave rise to a fierce dispute among critics, which today is an important source for frame research, because its frame had been »built by the sculptor Kühn according to Friedrich’s specifications.« The sculptor in question is Christian Gottlieb Kühn (1780–1828). By using this frame – unfortunately, no sketches for it survive – Friedrich irrevocably sacralized his landscape. The formal elements and details of the frame, which tapers to form a pointed arch, combine a series of allusions to Christian iconography. In the predella, the Eye of God, also known as the Eye of Providence, is flanked by grain ears and vine leaves. Both allude to the symbols of Christ’s body and blood served at the Last Supper. The bundled columns bordering the painting at each side end in palm leaves which, according to biblical tradition, were waved by Christ’s followers who welcomed the Messiah upon his entry into Jerusalem. Above the painting they close like an arch, with five small, winged angel heads looking out from it. Caspar David Friedrich had been interested in the subject since as early as 1806. A relevant drawing is kept in the NATIONAL LIBRARY OF NORWAY in Oslo, which, however, cannot be considered a frame sketch. In 1977, the Tetschen Altar’s design was analyzed in detail by Gerhard Kolberg in his dissertation on The Function of Picture Frames and Their Relationship to Visual Composition in German Romantic Painting and Printmaking.

The Tetschen Altar is pivotal to the issue of Friedrich’s framing concepts. It shows, for one thing, that Friedrich reflected on frames in terms of content. For the artist the Gothic period is the reference period of his romantic worldview: it is Christian symbolism and, as part of an awakening sense of national identity, a mirror of an emerging historical awareness.

Is There Such a Thing as a Typical Friedrich Frame?

Friedrich was familiar with the Gothic formal vocabulary. In 1817 the Stralsund city council asked him to create drawings for a neo-Gothic-style decoration of the choir of the Marienkirche. Other drawings of Gothicized frames for an altar and for a landscape painting are kept in the GERMANISCHES NATIONALMUSEUM in Nuremberg, as well as in Oslo, where one drawing ended up in the NATIONAL MUSEUM as the result of its acquisition of Dahl’s estate.

Noticeable in this regard is a type of Gothicizing frame that to this day surrounds at least three of Friedrich’s paintings. The frames have very deep cove molding that is bordered on the inside and outside by two paired strips. A deep groove is drawn between the strips to suggest architectural dynamism. The same frame profile can be found around the painting in the collection of FRIEDENSTEIN CASTLE in Gotha that is also titled Cross in the Mountains but features a more symmetrical composition; around The Stages of Life (1834) in the LEIPZIG MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS; and around the deeply mystical architecturescape Ruins of the Oybin Monastery (The Dreamer), dated 1812 (Hamburger Kunsthalle).

In the case of the Gotha Cross in the Mountains and Stages of Life, it is quite conceivable that Friedrich made a deliberate and preferred choice to use these frames. Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, had commissioned the former painting from Friedrich shortly before he died in 1822. Börsch-Supan assumes that it was sent to Gotha by 1824 at the earliest, as it was still mentioned in letters by visitors to Friedrich’s studio in Dresden until that year. The painting from 1834 also suggests that this frame was used by Friedrich himself. The Leipzig museum acquired it in 1931 from Sophie Siemsen. According to Jan Nicolaisen, head of the nineteenth-century collection, she was a descendant of Friedrich. It is not known when the Ruins of the Oybin Monastery left Friedrich’s studio. Stylistically, the profile of this painting’s frame suggests a date post quem of the mid-1820s. Similar to the Schinkel frames, which were developed in 1826 for the Altes Museum, they feature a compact profile, based on Gothic window embrasures rather than on antique architraves. Whether Friedrich even designed it himself must remain an open question. However, the examples indicate that the painter, if left to him, favored this frame. He probably worked with the same frame maker over an extended period of time. It is also possible that his younger brother, Christian Joachim Friedrich, helped with the framing. He worked as a cabinetmaker and made printing blocks for the painter.

The subject of Caspar David Friedrich and the frames of his paintings remains for now a broad field. To date, his letters have not been fully transcribed. And to this day, the genesis of many of the images remains in the dark. A great deal of research still awaits us to be able to move on from a frame from Friedrich’s day to the certainty that there is a specific Friedrich frame.

Sabine Spindler in cooperation with WERNER MURRER RAHMEN, (Translated by Bram Opstelten)

Mind You

Antique frames are extremely rare. There are only about a dozen dealers worldwide who deal in antique frames. Frames are subject to the zeitgeist and the tastes of the day, which is why many were lost, almost always when works changed hands. These days, there are efforts to reframe paintings in original frames reflecting their time of origin.

We have about 2,500 antique frames in stock, with our main focus being on nineteenth-century German frames and early twentieth-century artists’ frames, in addition to frames from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.

As part of a large-scale project to reframe works by Caspar David Friedrich for the HAMBURGER KUNSTHALLE, we managed to find optimal solutions for four paintings in our diverse stock of frames. Yet even with our almost endless assortment, we sometimes hit the wall: the requirements were high as the HAMBURGER KUNSTHALLE desired to also find a historic frame from Friedrich's creative time for The Sea of Ice.

A replica frame would have been a less-than-ideal solution.

After an extensive search, international cooperation was needed. Obviously, the frame needed to be from the period and large enough. Thanks to the energetic help of Robert Knöll of KNOELL RAHMEN in Basel, the apparently only existing frame was found in the collection of Michael Gregory of ARNOLD WIGGINS & SONS in London.

I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Robert. I also wish to extend my cordial thanks to Michael!

After a first “fitting” in Hamburg – to the original painting of course – the frame then traveled to Munich where it still needed to be cut to the required dimensions, extensively restored, and upgraded to meet today's museum requirements, so it could be presented to the public for the first time at the DIRECTOR’S DINNER of the foundation supporting the HAMBURGER KUNSTHALLE.

Werner Murrer, WERNER MURRER RAHMEN