The Return of the Monk

Caspar David Friedrich painted on a fine linen weave of flax fibre. The stretchers have not been preserved. The Monk by the Sea and The Abbey in the Oakwood are both painted on canvases originally joined on the same roll of fabric. The canvases have three priming layers. The bottom layer is coloured with a brilliant red pigment and is followed by two light brown layers. While the first two primings were applied with a palette knife, the third seems to have been applied with a roller; it has a finely structured surface, which Caspar David Friedrich was able to make excellent use of in his painting technique.

The artist drew the underdrawings for his compositions in pencil on this priming. These underdrawings have been rendered visible using infra-red light; they are richly detailed and were obviously very important in the artist’s search for pictorial expression.

The painting of both works continues with a very thin underpaint. The Abbey has just one layer of paint over this. The Monk on the other hand has two layers and was originally conceived as a dark blue painting. Friedrich later laid a second paint layer over the middle section of sky in light blue, pink and white. The artist used white lead with a little ochre, green, brown and black pigment. He also used the blue pigment smalt, probably for its semi-transparent nature. By combining a specific technique allowing the thinnest of paint layers to accumulate into the depths of the structured priming resulting in very fine points of colour, the artist avoided visible brushstrokes and created almost continuous gradations of colour.

Soon after they were finished, the two paintings were covered with an egg-white varnish, of which slight residues still remain. It is not known whether this varnish was applied in Dresden by the artist himself or in Berlin by someone else. Temporary egg-white varnishes were recommended in the 19th Century for freshly-painted oil pictures as this gave them the necessary saturation effect while still allowing the oil to dry. These egg-white varnishes were later rinsed off and replaced with the final varnish, usually a natural resin.

The canvases have undergone especially calamitous changes. During preparations for the great 1906 exhibition of ‘A Century of German Art 1775-1875’ in which Friedrich’s works were shown to a wide audience again for the first time, the two paintings were reinforced with a second canvas. This ‘lining’ with additional fabric glued over the whole of the reverse side of the original canvas was intended to stabilise the paintings and mend tears and holes. But this entailed considerable damage to the paintings; the edges of the canvases were trimmed and new, coarse canvas was ironed on with a mixture of wax and resin. Lumps of incompletely melted wax made the canvas lumpy, while the heat and pressure caused large-scale damage to the primings and paint layers. Several imprints of the iron can still be seen on the front of The Monk by the Sea. The missing sections caused by this and other damage were simply filled and then painted over.

The greatest harm to the overall appearance of the two paintings has been done by the up to seven layers of varnish that have been applied over the decades. The heavy yellowing of these coatings has caused extreme colour shifts, especially in the blue areas. In some places, the varnishes were permeated with microscopically small cracks which caused heavy reflection of light and made them lie over the layers of colour like a milky veil.

The linings of the canvases mentioned above were left there, as removing them would have exposed the paintings to heavy mechanical stress. The paint layer was stabilised and the surface cleaned and made ready for the varnish removal. Badly integrated, discoloured filling, retouchings and over-painting from earlier restorations were removed. The Monk by the Sea was also loosened from its stretcher which was enlarged so that it can do its job again. After the tension of the canvas had been adjusted for both paintings, the lacunae were refilled. An intermediate varnish was sprayed on to isolate the fillings and saturate the colours of the paint layer. Then the fillings were retouched.

The new retouchings were limited to reestablishing the readability of the artworks. The many small areas of losses and abrasion, were only suppressed optically in a few areas where they demonstrably falsified the paintings, in The Monk by the Sea especially at the edges of the clouds, which previously appeared as dark rainclouds.

Another thin layer of varnish was sprayed on to complete the conservation.

In the special exhibition The Monk is Back, the underdrawings of the two paintings are being shown to the public for the first time as infra-red reflectograms giving an insight into the creative process. In The Monk by the Sea the emptying of the seascape has been made visible: by painting over three sailing ships that were originally planned the artist heightened the ‘infinite solitude’ in that ‘boundless waste of water’ that contemporaries such as Clemens Brentano and Heinrich von Kleist had never seen before in painting.

The structure of the perspective of the church architecture is clearly shown in the underdrawing of The Abbey in the Oakwood, and many details of the procession of monks can be seen, such as the crucifixes and prayer books in their hands.

Historical Retouchings had disturbed the clear structure of horizontals, ellipses and hyperbolae used in the paintings, and the conservation managed to bring back considerable calm to the composition. Overall, both paintings were in a better state of preservation than originally thought; for the Monk around 97 % of the original painting is preserved…

…and for the Abbey 98 %; and 11 % and 8 % respectively could be revealed by removing overpainting and retouching. Removing the heavily yellowed varnish layers brought even more clarity and re-established the original gradations of colour.  After 200 years, the cool, blue tone dominating The Monk by the Sea and at least slightly discernible still in The Abbey in the Oakwood after the degeneration of the smalt, once again clearly shows how close the relationship is between these, the most famous pair of paintings from German Romanticism.