Oehme, a pupil of Caspar David Friedrich’s, stayed faithful to his teacher’s themes and motifs all his life, but never aspired to the same spiritual heights. He was fired by enthusiasm for the days when knights roamed
the land, the emotions aroused by twilight and night-time, and dramatic lighting conditions. Sharing the same enthusiasms, Carl Borromäus von Miltitz had restored a fortress once inhabited by his ancestors, which was
situated between Dresden and Meißen. After 1812 he gathered a circle of Romantic artists there. Their dream is symbolized in the shape of the knight on horseback springing towards the newly revived fortress. Thus the
carefully executed, topographically exact Burg Scharfenberg constitutes an amalgamation of a realistic view and a Romantic landscape. It seems that Oehme had already drawn this same fortress from memory in Rome in 1824.
His friend Ludwig Richter described the (now lost) pen-and-ink drawing in his memoirs: “An old castle with high Renaissance gables, looking out from among ancient, leafless oak trees and showing a row of festively lit
windows.”
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