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The famous chalk cliffs on the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea.

Friedrich made this sketch in 1801 on his first visit to the island, then part of his home region of Swedish Pomerania. He often went back there, hiking and sketching. Later, the Rügen landscape gave him the motif for one of his most famous works – The Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, with three figures at the edge of the cliffs looking out to sea.

In this sketch, he drew the cliffs from below. He only first began painting five years later when he was 32 years old. In contrast to the more narrative figural studies in his Small Mannheim Notebook, as it’s known, which he filled at the same time and can also be seen in our exhibition, his Rügen pictures were copied precisely from nature. So the stones must have been lying just as we see them here. He sketched out the scene in pencil, afterwards tracing the contours in ink. To highlight the spatial and light conditions, he worked a few areas carefully with hatched pencil lines and added a light colour wash.

The sketch is marked off into small squares. In this way, he could accurately scale up the image when transferring it to a larger format. Sketches like this provided the basis for his sepia landscapes. Sepia is a brownish-colour ink derived from a pigment secreted by cuttlefish or squid and it was Friedrich’s sepia drawings of Rügen that gave him his first success as an artist. Highly praised, they were shown in exhibitions and for a while secured the young Friedrich a living.