Greifswald harbor
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Greifswalder Hafen is the title of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich that was created around 1818 to 1820, during the Romantic era. Today it belongs to the holdings of the Berlin National Gallery and has been on display in the Alte Nationalgalerie on Museum Island since December 2001 .
Image content
The picture, painted using the technique of oil on canvas, has a format of 90 × 70 cm and depicts a scene on the Greifswalder Bodden in portrait format . It is the point where the Ryck flows into the Bodden. In the center of the picture is a two-masted sailing ship, which in this composition represents a kind of protagonist . The yards of the masts form a triangular composition scheme and a cross motif, which Caspar David often uses. The small boats move in a light wind from the front left to the back right, giving life to the picture, just like the staffage figures in the foreground. The silhouette with the towers of the city of Greifswald can be seen in the background . The vertically aligned composition of the picture, reaching far into the sky, the evening warm light and the hazy depth of the horizon of the scenery symbolize calm human life in a time of peace compared to the immensity of the sky. Despite the exact reproduction of the local conditions, the picture has nothing of the genre-like character of a vedute . In 1974, an infrared image revealed that the three staffage figures and the small boat in the front left were added later. They probably do not come from Friedrich, but have been inserted by the commissioner of the picture, who did not understand the reduction of the narrative in Friedrich's pictures. Werner Hofmann , the director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle at the time, wrote in the catalog about the exhibition of the picture in 1974/75: The atmospheric content of Friedrichscher Hafenbilder excludes a rigid allegorical meaning, but not the possibility of multilayered associations in the figurative sense such as security, peace and old age .
Provenance, dating and authorship
The painting Greifswalder Hafen by Caspar David Friedrich belonged first to a woman Justice Councilor Kirchhof from Greifswald, then to a rear admiral retired . D. Kirchhof from Warnemünde . It came into the possession of the Berlin National Gallery in 1919, and since then it has had the inventory number A II 356, NG 1317 .
It is difficult to date the picture exactly, the information ranges from 1807 to 1825. In the 1970s, dating around 1820 was largely accepted. Helmut Börsch-Supan dates the picture between 1818 and 1825 because a hand drawing by Caspar David's from 1818 depicts a very similar, centrally placed sailing ship. Börsch-Supan, however, also questioned the authorship of Friedrich and excluded it from the catalog raisonné, which, however, met with strong opposition from the professional world.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hans Gerhard Hannessen: paintings of German Romanticism in the National Gallery in Berlin. Frölich & Kaufmann, Berlin 1985, p. 30.
- ^ Werner Hofmann: Exhibition catalog 1974. Hamburg, p. 33.
- ↑ Werner Sumowski: Caspar David Friedrich Studies. Wiesbaden 1970, p. 75 ff.
- ^ Helmut Börsch-Supan, Karl Wilhelm Jähnig: Caspar David Friedrich, paintings, prints and pictorial drawings, Munich 1973, no. 284
- ^ Catalog of the exhibition in Hamburg 1974, p. 228; Wieland Schmied: Caspar David Friedrich. Cologne 1975, p. 76 and catalog of the Nationalgalerie, Berlin 1976, p. 125 f.