Sangerhausen from the east (Rosarium)

The surroundings of Sangerhausen are more picturesque than you might think. You can choose between five circular hiking routes. Everywhere you look, the cone of the Hohe Linde north of Sangerhausen catches your eye. The mountain has grown since 1955 as a spoil heap from the now closed copper mining operations, bearing witness to a long industrial history. It will take decades before vegetation grows on its slopes, but it has the potential to become the city’s most famous viewpoint one day! If you arrive by train, you’ll be welcomed by the bright, modern, and beautifully restored station building from 1963, the heyday of copper mining.

Adrian Ludwig Richter (1803–1884) didn’t want to simply copy, etch and colour mechanically like his father and teacher of copper engraving. He wanted to express feelings. That’s why he started landscape painting at the Academy in Dresden, then went to Italy with a scholarship from the publisher Arnold from Dresden, and even achieved some success. But for eight years he had been stuck in Meißen as a teacher at the porcelain manufactory; there was little time for painting and it didn’t earn any money. He had three children, his beloved wife was ill, and the money wasn’t enough. That was when the turning point came. He received a commission that also took him to the Harz Mountains in the summer of 1836. In his memoirs, he described how this came about.

From then on, Richter mainly drew designs for prints, which made him famous. Because he observed poor people and painted comfort into his pictures. Late Romantic idylls that struck a nerve. One such scene is also told in the foreground of the Sangerhausen sheet: the rich man beside the carriage comes out of Christian charity to take the poor widow from Sangerhausen and her daughter to better circumstances in Osterode. It’s understandable that the artist handles the topography with some artistic freedom for the sake of a harmonious composition.

“One day Arnold [my publisher] came to me with an unusually sullen expression and confronted me, saying that I must have given a Leipzig publisher, Georg Wigand, my permission to copy some of the brochures of Saxon Switzerland from his publishing house. I was neither acquainted with the said publisher nor with the work in question, but I could well understand how Papa Arnold, who had already often and badly suffered from reprints, must have become embittered through infringements of his rights. It was easy for me to make him see that I had no involvement in this matter, and we parted on our usual friendly terms. As he then threatened Wigand with a lawsuit, Wigand came to Dresden, and the two men settled their dispute. On this occasion Wigand visited me; he, still quite unfamiliar at the time with art and artists, had first learnt of my existence in Dresden through Arnold. He told me that the dispute with him had been about using a few plates of ‘Views of Saxon Switzerland’ for his copperplate series ‘Picturesque Romantic Germany’, which was then in preparation; he had sent the plates etched by me to London, to have them translated into a more effective manner for steel engraving, and had had to pay dearly for it. Finally, he asked me whether I would like to draw and execute from nature some of the still missing views for the ‘Saxon Switzerland’ section. Now, back in Rome I had already been thinking about one day creating a work, ‘The Three German Rivers – Rhine, Danube, Elbe’, in which not only picturesque but also historically remarkable regions, towns, castles, monasteries, and so on, in connection with folk costumes, festivals, and customs, were to be worked into a poetic whole. As our conversation went on, I explained this long-cherished favourite idea to Wigand, and with enthusiasm he exclaimed that this was precisely what he had been vaguely envisioning, and he asked me to take on a few parts of the work. We agreed on the sections: ‘Harz’, ‘Franconia’, and the ‘Giant Mountains’, and in this way I came into business contact with Georg Wigand for the first time, and the drawings made for ‘Picturesque and Romantic Germany’ became the bridge to my later compositions for wood engraving. The journeys through those picturesque regions of Germany were mostly carried out on foot and provided my sketchbook and memory with a rich collection of images and experiences of German folk life, which proved highly beneficial to my later work.”