Meadows near Greifswald

Step 1 · How the picture was made

The drawing precedes the sky in paint

The Hamburger Kunsthalle dates this canvas 1821/22. The Pommersches Landesmuseum, which holds the preparatory meadow drawing, says Friedrich used it in his Dresden studio for both Greifswald in Moonlight (1817) and this later painting. A view recorded on paper could therefore serve more than one painted illumination.

The drawing’s date needs a qualifier. Johannes Grave’s museum account places it probably around 1806; this study has not established a dated inscription on the sheet. The canvas date also varies: the museum uses 1821/22, while Kilian Heck’s 2018 article uses the broader 1820–22. Neither date identifies the weather represented.

The museums’ chronology records departure from Dresden on 24 April 1806, a stay in Neubrandenburg in May, Greifswald on 13 June, Rügen from 29 June to 20 July, and return to Dresden in August. We use May–July 1806, the three whole calendar months between departure and return, for regional travel context. This is not a claim that the meadow drawing was made within those months, or that Friedrich stayed continuously in Greifswald.

Step 2 · What Friedrich changed

A recognisable city, deliberately arranged

Grave describes the city centred in a strongly symmetrical composition, set between green meadows and a luminous, cloudless sky. Haze distances the town. Heck likewise reads the contrast between the remote city and the near horses and meadows as part of the picture’s effect. These are descriptions of the painting, not measurements of atmospheric visibility.

The construction begins on paper. In Simon Elson’s report on the drawing, curator Birte Frenssen identifies the alteration of St Nicholas’s tower: Friedrich narrows and lengthens its rounded baroque upper part. The city remains identifiable, but topographical recognition does not mean that every feature has been copied unchanged. Nor does the reuse of the drawing establish that either painted sky records the weather when he drew it.

Step 3 · The regional record

Berlin during the 1806 journey

The Berlin Climate Record provides all 92 daily means for May–July 1806. Its reference point is about 177 km south of Greifswald. That distance is calculated to the city reference point, not to an exact drawing viewpoint. These are Berlin temperatures, shown to put the journey in a regional setting; they are not local observations at the meadow.

June’s mean in this series is lower than May’s, followed by a warmer July. The daily values show the variation within those months. Neither result tests the painting’s cloudlessness: temperature alone does not tell us the cloud cover, and no day of the drawing has been established.

Step 4 · What the comparison can establish

The place is traceable; the weather day is not

The evidence supports a study of how Friedrich made the picture: an earlier view of his home city, altered in the drawing and reused in a later studio composition. It does not support dating the canvas’s sky from a thermometer. The painted weather remains unknown; the Berlin record neither verifies nor contradicts it.