The Garden Terrace

In June 1811 Friedrich set out from Dresden on a walking tour of the Harz mountains with the sculptor Christian Gottlieb Kühn. They spent several days in Ballenstedt, a small princely town, and his sketchbook filled with the castle grounds and views of the Brocken, the highest peak in the Harz. The painting is assembled from those drawings. The wall is the old baroque park wall at Ballenstedt, the two chestnuts come from an avenue into town planted in 1800, and the Brocken sits much closer than it looks from there. A woman reads on a bench under the right-hand tree, seen in profile, a basket half covered by a red cloth nearby. When it was shown in 1812, a Weimar fashion journal called it a garden in the French style. That autumn it was bought for the Prussian royal family at the Berlin Academy exhibition.