1837 (ca.), Caspar David Friedrich, Dolmen near Gützkow -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) (special exhibition)
From the museum label: Like the oil painting on view in this gallery, this drawing depicts an ancient grave marker that Friedrich had first sketched in 1802 and later incorporated in several finished works. Here, he presented it isolated on a hilltop against an open sky, concentrating on the visual power of the rock formation itself: its irregular surfaces, negative spaces, and striking combination of mass and poise, the large stone almost impossibly balanced on much smaller ones. This dolmen had in fact been blasted more than fifteen years earlier, so that stone might be extracted from the ground beneath it, making this drawing a memorial to the monument itself.
1837 (ca.), Caspar David Friedrich, Dolmen near Gützkow -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) (special exhibition)
From the museum label: Like the oil painting on view in this gallery, this drawing depicts an ancient grave marker that Friedrich had first sketched in 1802 and later incorporated in several finished works. Here, he presented it isolated on a hilltop against an open sky, concentrating on the visual power of the rock formation itself: its irregular surfaces, negative spaces, and striking combination of mass and poise, the large stone almost impossibly balanced on much smaller ones. This dolmen had in fact been blasted more than fifteen years earlier, so that stone might be extracted from the ground beneath it, making this drawing a memorial to the monument itself.