Adrian Zingg
This motif is available free of charge as a collectable postcard at hosts and information points along this 6th stage of the Malerweg trail.
Born April 15th, 1734 in St. Gallen and died May 26th, 1816 in Leipzig, Adrian Zingg was first trained by his father, then by Berlin veduta painter, Alberli, and later in Paris.
In 1766 he was appointed as court copper engraver for the Saxon prince elector and became a teacher at the Dresden Art Academy. During his walking tours through the Elbe Sandstone Mountains he made a great number of sketches which he later used as a basis for sepia sheets, copper engravings and etches.
Zingg is considered to be the trail-blazer of newer Dresden landscape paintings. The sepia engraving shown here illustrates Zingg’s striving for topographical exactness, on the one hand, while at the same time exaggerating some characteristics of objects and landscape elements in a Mannerist style.
Malerweg trail – 6th stage:
These are the places where artists painted:
The historic Painters’ Trail originally ended at the Prebischtor Rock Arch and in the picturesque border village of Herrnskretschen (Hřensko). From there, the artists returned by boat down the Elbe River with a stopover at Lilienstein Mountain or Königstein Fortress. The modern Malerweg Trail also explores the left bank of the Elbe where completely different landscapes open up to the hiker.
Krippen Village: a little detour to the Elbe shore is well worth it here as these perspectives from the riverside have been famous for a long time. A drawing by Caspar David Friedrich that dates back to his three-month-stay in the village of Krippen has been preserved and shows a distinct boulder which later became part of his famous oil painting “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog”. The well-known mountainscape painter Irmgard Uhlig considers Friedrich’s painting “Rocky Ravine” as his “most expressive rock picture” and should be considered as a “highlight of Romantic landscape painting”.
