Woman in front of the setting sun
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| Woman in front of the setting sun |
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| Caspar David Friedrich , 1818 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 22.0 × 30.0 cm |
| Museum Folkwang Essen |
Woman in front of the setting sun , also sunset, sunrise, woman in the morning sun, morning light, is a painting by Caspar David Friedrich that was created before 1818 . The painting in oil on canvas in the format 22 × 30 cm is in the Museum Folkwang Essen .
Image description
The painting in a strictly symmetrical composition and warm reddish coloring shows a woman with ruby-red earrings in old German costume as a figure from behind, looking towards a sunset. The rays of the sun reaching over the whole sky are laid out as fanned out segments, as in the case of the Tetschen Altar and the picture The burning Neubrandenburg . The painter conveys a typical triad in the structure of the picture. In the lively foreground, the woman stands on a dirt road, which, lined with boulders, turns abruptly to the right after a few meters. The space blocker often used in Frederick (or landscape tie) blocked here the way through a fantasy - vegetation consisting of a voltage applied across the entire image width field of thick lanzettartigen leaves that prevent women from going on. Behind it, a varied landscape with fields, bushes, trees, hills and mountains develops towards the horizon. A church embedded in the landscape suggests a village.
Image interpretation
To explain the picture, three interpretive models are used, with a religious - nature-mystical , a political and a narrative approach. Helmut Börsch-Supan and Reinhard Zimmermann see the woman in front of the setting sun surrounded by rocks, mountains and a church as symbols of faith, interpreting them as the threat of death and the hold in faith. Friedrich's wife Caroline is said to have been a model for the person in the picture . Werner Sumowski prefers to adopt the reading according to which the figure on the back is depicted in the prayer pose of an "Orantin" and accordingly the person in front of the landscape symbolizes a movement of Christ, "the lonely view of nature as communion ". Werner Hofmann recognizes an inverted icon in the back figure that absorbs the landscape.
The political interpretation is derived from the old German costume of women, from whose use in Friedrich's pictures it is known that these clothes suggest resistance to the persecution of demagogues after the Karlsbad decisions of 1819 in the male figures . This relationship between the clothes and the sentiments of the figures is evidenced by statements made by the painter.
It is disputed for all interpretation models whether the picture is a sunset or a sunrise. Symbols related to death or hope, for example, depend on the associated visual mood. The title of the picture changed in various exhibition catalogs. The name "sunset", which was common in the 19th century, was changed to "sunrise" in the catalog of the 1906 exhibition of the century of German art . The 1974 catalog raisonné introduced the title “Woman in front of the setting sun”. Before that, according to Reinhard Zimmermann, who published a summary of almost all interpretations, 26 out of 30 interpretations were based on a rising sun. From 1974 onwards, the authors' determination of sunrise or sunset was balanced.
Sketches
A probably Bohemian drawing was implemented for the mountain range on the horizon . The sheet Mountain Range from the estate of Georg Friedrich Kersting belongs to the Karlsruhe sketchbook from 1804. The mountain range is also used in the background of the Weimar Sepia Summer Landscape with Dead Oak from 1805 and on the painting Neubrandenburg in the morning fog of 1816.
Provenance
The picture was owned by the family, most recently since 1905 owned by Johanna Friedrich, the daughter-in-law of Caspar David Friedrich's brother Heinrich. Anna Siemsen, owner since 1930, sold the painting to Gerstenberg GmbH in Chemnitz in 1937 . In the same year, the Museum Folkwang in Essen bought it from the exhibition at Gerstenberger.
Classification in the overall work
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The woman in front of the setting sun is one of the early back figures and is one of a series of paintings depicting women in the landscape and which were created before Friedrich's wedding in 1818. With compositional rigor, the painter achieves the iconic union of human figure and landscape in a way that he has not succeeded in doing in any of his other pictures. The painting Garden Terrace from 1811 is already considered to be an attempt to allow nature symbolism and personality to correspond through a symmetrical three-cycle image composition, whereby the reader is still outside of the axiality. The paintings Farewell and Woman at the Sea were created in close proximity to the woman before the setting sun . The woman in front of the setting sun was one of those pictures of the exhibition of the century of German art of 1906, with which Caspar David Friedrich was rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century.
natural Science
With the deep orange tint of the light of his sunsets, Friedrich may have become a faithful chronicler of the historical volcanic eruption on Tambora in Indonesia in 1815. The huge eruption had changed the air around the world. A group led by the physicist Christos Zerefos from the National Observatory in Athens examined landscape paintings from the past five centuries and compared the times when they were created with dates from major volcanic eruptions. The volcanoes blow so much sulfur particles into the higher atmosphere that the earth cools noticeably for a few years. The aerosols scatter the sunlight in such a way that particularly colorful sunsets are generated.
Web links
- Caspar David Friedrich: Woman in front of the setting sun , in the online collection of the Museum Folkwang Essen
literature
- Helmut Börsch-Supan, Karl Wilhelm Jähnig: Caspar David Friedrich. Paintings, prints and pictorial drawings. Prestel Verlag, Munich 1973, ISBN 3-7913-0053-9 (catalog raisonné)
- Werner Hofmann: Caspar David Friedrich. Natural reality and art truth. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-406-46475-0 .
- Reinhard Zimmermann: Caspar David Friedrich. Woman in front of the setting sun . Edition Lioncel, 2014
- Detlef Stapf: Caspar David Friedrich's hidden landscapes. The Neubrandenburg contexts . Greifswald 2014, network-based P-Book
- Caspar David Friedrich - The Invention of Romanticism , Museum Folkwang - Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hirmer Verlag 2006, ISBN 3-7774-3015-3 .
- Board of the German Centennial Exhibition (Ed.): Catalog for the "Exhibition of German Art from the Period from 1775 to 1875 in the Royal National Gallery, Berlin 1906. " Verlag F. Bruckmann AG, Munich 1906 (2 volumes) archive.org archive.org
Individual evidence
- ^ Helmut Börsch-Supan, Karl Wilhelm Jähnig: Caspar David Friedrich. Paintings, prints and pictorial drawings. Prestel Verlag, Munich 1973, ISBN 3-7913-0053-9 (catalog raisonné), p. 348.
- ^ Werner Sumowski: Caspar David Friedrich studies . Franz Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden 1970, p. 23.
- ^ Werner Hofmann: Caspar David Friedrich. Natural reality and art truth. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-406-46475-0 , p. 108.
- ^ Karl Ludwig Hoch: Caspar David Friedrich, Ernst Moritz Arndt and the so-called demagogue persecution. In: Pantheon 44, 1986, p. 74.
- ^ Reinhard Zimmermann: Caspar David Friedrich. Woman in front of the setting sun . Edition Lioncel, Trier 2014.
- ↑ Christina Grummt: Caspar David Friedrich. The painting. The entire work. 2 vol., Munich 2011, p. 396.
- ↑ Axel Bojanowski : color analysis. Climate secret on old masterpieces . Spiegel online from March 25, 2014 Spiegel online