In November 1816, an article on the latest exhibition at the Berlin Academy of Arts appeared in the Zeitung für die Elegante Welt. Held one year after the end of the 1813–15 wars against Napoleon, this exhibition was entirely devoted to “patriotic art.” One of the works introduced in the report was the diptych On Outpost Duty – The Wreath-Maker (see Figures 1 and 2), painted in 1815 by the Saxon artist Georg Friedrich Kersting, who had joined the artistic group of “Dresden Romanticism” some years before. During and after the wars of 1813–15, Kersting expressed his German-national and early-liberal convictions in his paintings more explicitly than most of his artist friends. When he painted the diptych, the wars against Napoleonic France were coming to an end, and hopes for a German-national rebirth and greater political liberty were running high in the circles of “patriots” to which he belonged: reform-oriented, educated middle- and upper-class civil servants, officers, clergymen, educators, writers and artists whose objectives were the “liberation of the fatherland” and frequently more political liberty as well. His diptych depicts the complementary figures that embodied those hopes: young military volunteers and a “German maiden.”

On Outpost Duty, which Kersting himself had entitled “Theodor Körner, Karl Friedrich Friesen and Christian Ferdinand Hartmann on Outpost Duty,” portrays three men who, like Kersting, served as volunteers in the Lützower Freikorps (Lützow Free Corps), which had been authorized by the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III one month before his declaration of war against France on 15 March 1813. The corps was to enlist into its ranks mainly “young men from abroad” – that is, from German regions outside Prussia – who could arm and outfit themselves. Because of its all-German composition and the activities and publications of its best-known members, for the contemporary public and in collective memory it symbolized the German-national and early-liberal goals of the struggle for liberation. Among the most enthusiastic propagandists of the volunteer corps were Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Friedrich Friesen and Theodor Körner. Jahn, a Prussian teacher and journalist who is today known as the Turnvater – “the truly German father of gymnastics” – was one of the most influential activists of the early national movement.