Drawing, Mist above the Königssee, Bavaria (Germany)

Frederic Edwin Church

June–July 1868

brush and oil, graphite on tan paperboard

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Landscape sketch showing a view of mist over the Königssee, viewed from the road to the Malerwinkel, near Berchtesgaden, Bavaria (present-day Germany). A tall conifer tree grows out of a rocky outcropping on a slope in the foreground at lower left, which descends to a line of trees along the lakeshore in the middle distance at lower center. The surface of the Königssee extends from the middle distance to the background at lower right, bounded by sheer mountainsides that plunge into the lake at left and right. At upper left and upper center, a bank of mist luminously glows at it catches the sun's light. A steep, rugged mountainside i