Blankenburg 

Anyone who makes it up to the Grandfather Rock (stamp station of the Harz Hiking Badge) shouldn’t miss walking along the Devil’s Wall on the ridge of the Heidelberg Mountain, with its sandstone boulders, windswept pines, and beautiful views stretching as far as Timmenrode. On the way, you'll pass the Grandmother Rock, which of course can also be found here. The long-distance hiking trail North Sea – Masuria is well signposted and can be used here.

Christopher Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783–1853) is the most famous Danish painter of the 19th century. He was only 27 years old and on his way from Copenhagen to Paris when this drawing was created. The Harz mountains marked his first mountain experience, since the highest Danish mountain is just 172 metres high. But Eckersberg was in a hurry and doesn't seem to have stayed long — this is one of only two Harz drawings preserved in the Copenhagen museum. He was drawn to the famous Neoclassical painters in Paris, such as Jacques Louis David, and later to Italy, where he stayed for seven years. He had a scholarship for that, which he had worked hard to obtain for a long time. Before that, he had spent years struggling with printmaking commissions. It wasn’t until 1809, after the death of Nicolai Abildgaard, the director of the Copenhagen Academy, that he finally succeeded — ironically, with a poor painting.

Later, he succeeded in everything he set out to do — history, portrait, nude, landscape. He immersed it all in his precise rendering, nourished by accurate observation. Exaggeration and romanticism were not his thing. In 1817, he became a professor and teacher at the Copenhagen Academy of Fine Arts, and through his many students, his fame spread everywhere, marking the beginning of Denmark’s Golden Age of Painting.