Nephosthe weather behind the paintings
Detail of Friedrich’s pencil drawing: Quistorp reclining on the capstone of the Gützkow megalithic tomb, with measurement notes above.
Caspar David Friedrich, Tree Study with Two Views of the Megalithic Tomb near Gützkow, detail. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, 1934/10 verso. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (SigridHinz269.jpg).

A study against the weather record

Caspar David Friedrich

Megalith near Gützkow

19 March 1802, published date · Pencil · Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne, 1934/10 verso

Quistorp lay on the stone while Friedrich drew. What can the records establish about that one day?

1 day19 March 1802 in scholarship. Regional temperature survives; weather at the tomb remains unknown.

Regional context onlyLocal weather unknown

The recordsThe sheet in the museum chronicle

The Nephos method

How this study was read

The method in full

  1. What is written

    A pencil study with Quistorp on the capstone, dated 19 March 1802 in scholarship. The original date inscription was not independently read.

  2. Records of those days

    Not found or not yet searched

    • No local weather register for the day has been verified.
    • The full sheet and Grummt’s catalogue entry remain unread; the date is taken from a scholarly indexed excerpt.

  3. Each claim tested

    • Does the reclining figure establish a warm, dry day? No. Quistorp describes his action, not the temperature, rain or cloud.
    • Can the snow in a later painting be assigned to this drawing date? No. Scholarship traces the stone motif into later compositions, not their weather back to this day.

  4. Verdict

    Berlin records 8.0 °C as its daily mean. The weather at the tomb remains unknown.

    • UnknownWeather at the Gützkow tomb A distant daily mean cannot establish conditions at the drawing site.

What this cannot tell you. Berlin combines changing observing sites. No local estimate, climate rank, modern normal or cross-station average is calculated. The reproduced image is a small detail of the sheet; no date inscription is visible in it.

Step 1 · The drawing and its date

One sheet, one published day

This is a pencil study of the megalithic tomb near Gützkow, with Friedrich’s teacher Johann Gottfried Quistorp reclining on its capstone. The sheet belongs to the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud in Cologne: inventory 1934/10, verso, Grummt 296 verso. Its catalogue title is Tree Study with Two Views of the Megalithic Tomb near Gützkow. The reproduction above shows a detail, not the full sheet. Object identification; image and rights.

Birgit Verwiebe’s published account dates the sketch to 19. März 1802. The joint museum chronicle instead calls it a drawing of 1801; this study follows the more specific published date, 19 March 1802, while retaining that disagreement. Verwiebe, 2024, pp. 83–84; museum chronicle, note 5.

The date was checked in an indexed scholarly excerpt. The full sheet and Grummt’s catalogue entry were not available for inspection, so an exact transcription of Friedrich’s date inscription remains unverified. This is a study of the reported sketching day, not a date assigned to a later painting.

Step 2 · What the witness describes

A figure on the stone, not a weather report

In Quistorp’s recollection, published by Karl Schildener in 1828 and reproduced by the state archaeology service, he says that while Friedrich drew he lag ich oben auf dem Decksteine und rauchte ein Pfeifchen: lay on top of the capstone and smoked a little pipe. This supports the identification of the figure and the act of drawing. It says nothing about rain, cloud, temperature or the hour. The reported recollection.

Verwiebe describes two views of the stones and traces one into later compositions, including Megalithic Tomb in Snow. That is evidence of a reused motif, not evidence that snow belonged to the drawing day. Nor can Quistorp’s reclining pose establish a warm, dry afternoon. The weather records can test neither assumption without evidence from the site. The drawing’s later use.

Step 3 · The surviving daily record

Berlin supplies regional context

The Berlin Climate Record gives a daily mean of 8.0 °C for 19 March 1802. Its inner-city reference point lies about 159 km south of Gützkow. This is a Berlin daily mean, not a temperature measured beside Friedrich’s drawing or at the moment he worked. The published data.

The one dated day: Berlin, regional context only
DateStation seriesDaily mean air temperature
19 March 1802Berlin inner city8.0 °C

Kadow and colleagues digitized the series from the 1971 Das Klima von Berlin volume. Their documentation describes changing observing sites and no additional bias correction. The distance uses the series reference point and a town reference point for Gützkow; neither locates the original instrument or the destroyed tomb precisely. The temperature is read directly from the dated source row, without a unit conversion or an average across stations. Series documentation; Gützkow reference point.

Step 4 · What remains unknown

The weather at the tomb is still missing

The daily record establishes Berlin’s temperature context. It does not recover Gützkow’s temperature, rainfall, cloud, wind or snow cover. No authenticated local weather account for the day was found. The blank paper around the stones is not treated as a clear sky, and no weather is inferred from the pose.

The search also checked Greifswald’s university-observatory history and the DWD archive, a Copenhagen historical compilation, and Swedish series. The DWD Greifswald series begins in 1898. The downloaded Lund monthly series has no March 1802 row. The Copenhagen compilation reports gaps that March, but the status of this particular day remains unverified. Stockholm and Uppsala have daily entries; their greater distance prevents using them to identify conditions at the tomb. These search limits do not establish that no earlier local manuscript survives. Greifswald history; DWD; Lund; Copenhagen; Stockholm; Uppsala.

A legible full-sheet image or the catalogue entry would settle the inscription check. An authenticated nearby diary or weather register for the day would improve the meteorological test. Until then, the result is one regional daily value and an explicit local unknown. No climate rank or modern anomaly is claimed.

Sources

Every source on this page

Weather calculations use cached files checked against their sha256 fingerprints. The source entries distinguish original documents, extracted text, a modern transcription and indexed text. A fingerprint preserves the version used; it does not resolve a source’s uncertainty.

  1. Holger Birkholz, joint museum chronicle, Megalithic Tomb in Autumn, note 5Joint museum chronicle; brief quotation/paraphrase; no image reuse · retrieved 8 October 2026sha256 3f1868b7a4f4ba8fde730cdedb45154e4d93ed91b3a553b96fa23c8726641779
  2. Landesamt für Kultur und Denkmalpflege Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, January 2026: Schildener’s report of QuistorpPublic state archaeology account; short attributed quotation; no image reuse · retrieved 8 October 2026sha256 4c5e45638f97bb1ac0113dabd882e2c4d14f3796174aa7e727ec7348febacaf0
  3. Wikimedia Commons, SigridHinz269.jpg, rights and scopeCommons metadata CC BY-SA; inspect image-specific PD declaration before downloading image · retrieved 8 October 2026sha256 a1dee4e8f947b1d26a5a1d4b840b2904f23f21481cb940b1f60ede7995303188
  4. Friedrich, Gützkow tomb with Quistorp (detail), via Wikimedia CommonsPublic domain, Public Domain Mark 1.0 in cached Commons file page; faithful scan; Friedrich died 1840 · retrieved 8 October 2026sha256 7fef6bb1ff3a02978a4bacc0f2a08c80d352f29909f2eff11fed770ab0581291
  5. OpenStreetMap, Gützkow town reference pointODbL 1.0 OpenStreetMap contributors; town reference point only · retrieved 8 October 2026sha256 dde09e2f2fee9ee7d662a1937484a03b66618f2c9ca9f8a79810b1717155a628
  6. Bolin Centre, Stockholm daily mean temperatures, Anders MobergODC-By, Anders Moberg, Bolin Centre Database · retrieved 8 October 2026sha256 c240ae8d6f0a8888b909e3618bd004a818df90980392a086de83a5a61039c422
  7. Bolin Centre, documentation for Stockholm daily temperaturesODC-By dataset metadata · retrieved 8 October 2026sha256 5d44d4925722d82b41310a490ccb3f794c487b12fd1e61b5c637d3969cd65cee
  8. SMHI / Hans Bergström, Uppsala daily series 1722–2022SMHI open data, Hans Bergström Uppsala University; CC BY 4.0 · retrieved 8 October 2026sha256 de4e7891c1a71257ca6f5dc3d1ae03326b766621f2eb169d4c3aa1d7b274726d
  9. SMHI, Uppsala series documentationSMHI open data documentation; CC BY 4.0 · retrieved 8 October 2026sha256 f4831d045035f6ecf9d98591d94d01003c6a80c3e195eea3743a949fce7c8415
  10. V. Willaume-Jantzen, Meteorologiske Observationer i Kjøbenhavn (1896), p. 6Public-domain historical meteorological report, 1896 · retrieved 8 October 2026sha256 0df690b5e8eeb30d8a098f2325dd51d736e0e6eb93c685a66a058eec0f8489e8
  11. Kadow, Wentzel, Jaekel, Bahlo and Cubasch (2016), Berlin Climate Record: daily mean temperature, 1766–1934CC BY-SA 3.0; PANGAEA. Berlin-derived data and chart shared under the same licence · retrieved 8 October 2026sha256 c58698c3da82e2dfc370474f466009bd68a649ed936873b15b9f25e6d725d269Reused identical bytes from T93 cache; original retrieval 8 October 2026 UTC.
  12. Deutscher Wetterdienst, daily climate station inventory (coverage check)CC BY 4.0, Deutscher Wetterdienst; cached terms dated May 2024 · retrieved 8 October 2026sha256 dcfd7322e4ae3ddb9cef2619f2034b57945315a81ae64e3913daf8096bc81c7bReused identical bytes from T93 cache; original retrieval 8 October 2026 UTC.
  13. SMHI, Lund 53430, monthly mean air temperature, corrected archive (coverage check)SMHI open data; CC BY 4.0, attribution SMHI · retrieved 8 October 2026sha256 a3efc3fe42bb13d06841bef8b49cb6ca30db5c6c38763ddc03f376f5aef93108Reused identical bytes from T93 cache; original retrieval 8 October 2026 UTC.
  14. Birgit Verwiebe, An der Grenze der Sichtbarkeit, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 65 (2024), pp. 83–84Copyright scholarly text; short quotation and attributed paraphrase only · retrieved 8 October 2026sha256 c14eda1e46f403a07da8dfe1471aedfd902dca3e2446060e9622df99dcd8d5f7Saved search-service excerpt of the indexed article. Full PDF returned an access challenge; neither scan nor date handwriting was inspected.
  15. Nephos inspection of the available image detailNephos research record, CC BY 4.0 · retrieved 8 October 2026sha256 e28b18024c4539b67693611d63a7918e4200947d3ae92212823596fbf7000473Measurement notes normalized; date inscription remains null. Committed copy in window-engine/evidence/friedrich-megalith-1802-03-19/.

The numbers on this page, as JSONThe method card, as JSON