Skizzenbuch c. 1840

Peter Burnitz drew mainly medieval half-timbered houses, churches and castles as well as tree studies in the tradition of Jakob Philipp Hackert with pencil into this undated sketchbook. He gave the carefully executed drawings a three-dimensionality by using very regular, fine strokes. Sometimes he worked out some parts with hatching, while the rest of the drawing was done only in contours. Two of his paintings, the studies of a castle and a church ruin, he also coloured with a brush in light brown and grey-blue.Presumably, at least a part of the drawings was made after other drawings. The first indication of this is the coloured, rather sober view of a small, one-nave sacred building with a tower ruin on sheet 15 recto, which is done nearly identically in sketchbook SG 2366 (see there sheet 20 recto). The two drawings, which focus on the building – here realised comparatively comprehensively, there only sketched out in part – correspond so precisely with one another that Burnitz can hardly have drawn them from nature, let alone with a time lag. It is more likely that he worked from a master model or copied his own drawing. However, there are no signs of tracing in either of the two drawings. A further clue is provided by the study of a gnarled tree trunk on sheet 10 recto, which astonishes with its striking similarity to a drawing by the artist colleague Carl Theodor Reiffenstein from 1839 (see Inv. 7631, Städel Museum). Here, too, one can only assume that both would have drawn from the same design or from each other. The latter would at least be possible, since both the 15-year-old Burnitz and Reiffenstein, four years his senior, lived in Frankfurt in 1839. Basically, the very precise, concentrated strokes of Burnitz’s drawings in this sketchbook seem to speak against working outdoors. This is certainly true of the two delicate, almost composed sections of landscape towards the end of the sketchbook, which can hardly be based on nature (sheets 18 recto and 20 recto). Finally, the uncertain perspectives that characterise some of his drawings in the early sketchbooks, which were created from nature, cannot be observed here ‒ speaking for the assumption that he worked from models in this case.For a full sketchbook description, please see “Research”.