The Cleveland Museum of Art

• Full conservation statement
  This finished landscape drawing featuring Gnandstein Castle in Saxony, Germany, was executed in gray wash and black ink (applied with pen and point-of-brush) with brown ink and traces of graphite underdrawing. The support is a medium-weight wove paper with a creamy, off-white color and a uniform formation. A partial, but identifiable watermark, J Whatman/1794, identifies the support as a high-quality wove paper from Kent, England. Developed around 1755 by James Whatman I, it was roughly three decades before wove paper was produced in significant quantities. Eventually the product was widely exported and renowned for its superior quality. (Whatman papers were loft dried for a year prior to being sold.)
  
  Beginning with subtly graded washes Adrian Zingg created layers of receding hills. He then used an impressive range of shorthand notations, applied in pen and brush, to build up dense growths of trees with lush, full canopies. Pen work is evident in the finer (more distant) lines and in the various soft and sharp-edged “return strokes.” Looser and broader applications of ink applied with the point of a brush were used increasingly nearer to the picture plane. The abundant and intricate line work clearly relates to the artist’s etchings, but here yields perhaps softer effects and a more atmospheric interpretation of the subject, including both more nuanced and more dramatic depictions of light. Zingg expertly used the exposed “white” paper to create the effect of natural light spilling gracefully across the landscape from left to right in a completely credible manner, and to achieve great pictorial effects as well. A cumulous cloud, half in shadow and half in brilliant light, reinforces the direction and diffuse bright quality of the light source. The cloud seems to be moving from left to right across the sky; many of the distant tree tops also lean to the right and further animate the scene.
  
  Zingg rendered the foreground foliage with greater botanical accuracy to include individualistic plants; of singular note is a flower that is charming for its lack of formulaic interpretation. In this foreground grouping of plants the artist introduced a second (now) brown ink, possibly iron gall ink.
  
  Gnandstein Castle, an imposing Romanesque structure built in the 1200s, sits at a high vantage point in the left side of the composition surrounded by its castle town. In these buildings it is possible to see several sparse graphite lines of underdrawing, possibly drawn with the aid of a straight edge. Zingg depicted the beginnings of ruin in the castle tower, an apt choice for a drawing that anticipates the German Romantic movement. Another feature that plays into this theme is the grand and ancient-looking pine tree in the far left foreground and its companion tree already reduced to a torn stump, just to the right. There is one very slightly abraded area to a section of the contour line on the closest distant hill, roughly center. Based on its placement it makes most sense to interpret this as a very slight adjustment (essentially erasing) made by the artist.
• Provenance
  2015–

  The Cleveland Museum of Art
• Cite this Page
  {{cite web|title=View of the Castle Gnandstein|url=false|author=Adrian Zingg|year=c. 1795|access-date=12 May 2024|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}