The Watzmann

The Watzmann is an oil on canvas by Caspar David Friedrich showing the Watzmann mountain as seen from Berchtesgaden, looking towards the north-east. It belongs to Romantic landscape painting, a genre in which the German artist gave central importance to nature in its monumental scale and to the viewer's sense of standing before it. The sources disagree on the date: the data sheet gives 1820, while the reference text places the work between 1824 and 1825, so both dates should be treated with caution.

The painting's later history is well documented and is almost as significant as the work itself. After passing through several private owners in the nineteenth century, it came into the hands of Martin Brunn, a Jewish art collector living in Berlin. Nazi racial laws forced him to leave Germany, and in 1937 he sold the work to the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin for 25,000 reichsmarks, a sum that funded his family's escape to the United States. Adolf Hitler, who hoped to display it at the Berghof, his home at Berchtesgaden, contributed 10,000 reichsmarks towards the price, but the state regarded the sale as part of the so-called Jewish Property Tax, which complicated the painting's legal status.

In 2002 the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and Brunn's heirs negotiated a settlement. The DekaBank bought the painting from the heirs below its market value, with the Kulturstiftung der Länder acting as intermediary, and the work returned to the Nationalgalerie as a long-term loan. Today the Watzmann is therefore read both as a mountain image and as a case study of the history that surrounded it.

Painter

Caspar David Friedrich

Date

1820

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

135 × 170 cm

Museum

Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Movement

Romanticism

Genre

landscape painting

Depicts

Watzmann

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