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Lying against a rock, reading, out in the heart of the countryside. Thinking about what you’ve read, allowing your feelings space – wistful longing and sweet sorrow. This young woman appears to stand for an entire era. In the late eighteenth century, art and literature celebrated feelings and sensibility – and a refined sentiment surrendering to poetry and its emotions. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe captured this mood perfectly in his book The Sorrows of Young Werther, about an unhappy love affair. The cult book of sentimentality, it fascinated an entire generation – including the young Caspar David Friedrich. And the young woman in this sketch might be inspired by Goethe’s novel, or at least be reading it.

Scenes such as these were widespread at that time – and even immortalised in Meissen “Werther-themed” porcelain, on show in a display case opposite. On other sketchbook sheets here, Friedrich explored popular themes at that time: two close friends exchanging intimate thoughts or a woman sitting on a rock with one hand against her head. Friedrich took this figure, supplemented by a spider’s web, thistles and dead trees, for a woodcut – on show in the lower display. His sketchbooks include various motifs of sadness and melancholy, perhaps not so much reflecting just the age of sentimentalism as Friedrich’s own mental state and feelings. After all, he found it increasingly important to express his feelings in his art.

The empty spaces under the drawings and sketches are filled with little studies, an animal head or the back of a cow or the back legs of a hoofed animal – the latter set conspicuously under the legs of a reclining young woman. Despite a generally sombre and sad mood, is this a flash of Friedrich’s sense of humour?