Moon rise by the sea

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Moonrise by the Sea (Caspar David Friedrich)
Moon rise by the sea
Caspar David Friedrich , 1822
Oil on canvas
55.0 × 71.0 cm
Old National Gallery Berlin

Moonrise by the sea, also moonlight on calm sea is a painting by Caspar David Friedrich from 1822 . The painting in oil on canvas in the format 55 cm × 71 cm is in the Berlin National Gallery together with its counterpart, a village landscape with morning lighting .

Image description

The painting shows a man and two women sitting on a large boulder on the dark, stony seashore and looking at the natural spectacle of the moonrise. The people can be recognized as city dwellers by their clothing. The man wears a brown coat, a white shirt and a large green beret, so old German costume . The woman on the right in a green dress hugs the woman on the left in a red dress with a blue-green cloak. The cloud horizon is bathed in a violet light, behind it the full moon peeks out and covers the sea with a silvery shimmer. Two sailing ships are heading for the shore or are already in the roadstead; the sails are already being hauled in on the ship in front.

Structure and aesthetics

The painting is divided into two areas with the shore and the sea, which are parallel to each other and create a sudden break between the foreground and the background. The figures on the large stone appear almost silhouetted against the lighter background. The central axis of the picture runs through the distance between the man and the two women. The dark, stone bank gives the impression of absolute statics, which is reinforced by the people lost in themselves. In contrast, the background appears full of movement, with the ships, the reflected moonlight, the colors of the sky flowing into one another. The viewer's gaze experience realizes a space-time relationship in the great optical distance between near and far. The horizon almost halves the image and is drawn like a coordinate between two mirror-image hyperbola curves that follow the opening of the cloud bank in the moonlight above and the silhouette of the stone blocks below. The hyperbolic scheme in such a form can later only be found in the painting The Great Enclosure . The back figures determine the relationship between man and nature as a transcendental infinity, which Friedrich gives an aperspective and immeasurable spatial quality.

Counterpart

Caspar David Friedrich: Village Landscape with Morning Illumination , 1822

The counterpart village landscape with morning lighting creates a contrast to the moonrise by the sea in many ways : evening and morning, dark and light, water and land, stones and vegetation, townspeople as strangers by the sea and shepherds in the natural idyll. The different interpretations of the rising of the moon try to find a counterpart. There is agreement that both images are to be thought of together. Wieland Schmied suggests that the two paintings combine the times of day with human history and contemporary political reality. After the monk by the sea and the abbey in the oak forest, the two paintings are considered the most important pair of images in Friedrich's work.

Image interpretation

In the religious interpretation of the painting offered by Helmut Börsch-Supan , the three figures look at the rising moon as the symbol of Christ. The huge stones on the bank signified the Christian faith. The ships approaching the shore symbolized the end of life. The blue-violet basic tone of the picture stands for melancholy or sadness, which is overcome by the shine of the silver light. The use of this color symbolism by Friedrich is secured by a tradition from Ludwig Richter . For Jens Christian Jensen , the evening here means the redemption of a promise, the arrival of the divine. Water, ships, moon and sky would appear as a paradise in which earthly standards have no validity. Detlef Stapf recognizes the painting of mourning together with the village landscape located in Breesen in the morning light as a memory image for the painter's brother-in-law, August Sponholz. After the death of Friedrich's sister Dorothea in 1808, the widowed pastor von Breesen married her sister-in-law and friend Dorothea Brückner. When Sponholz died in 1819, Friedrich had also lost contact with the landscape in which he was so often.

Philipp Otto Runge: We Three , 1805

From the beret of the old German costume, Wieland Schmied derives the political confession of a demagogue who, according to the Karlsbad resolutions of 1819 , represented reformist, liberal and national ideas during the time of the Restoration . Peter Märker also sees the man with the beret as a demagogue, as a representative of a certain time, with reference to an era and certain expectations of the future. Hubertus Gaßner also projects the hopes and longings of the three waiting people into the spatial distance of the sea and sky zone. Klaus Lankheit recognizes in the painting a typical image of friendship from Romanticism with figures looking at nature, comparable to that of Philipp Otto Runge under the title We Three .

Studies and drawings

In the painting, Friedrich uses the brush drawing (tracing) Seated Man from around 1822 and the pen drawing (tracing) Two Seated Women from 1818 . According to Willi Geismeier, the breaks in the staffage figures are said to have come from a strange hand and were executed by Georg Friedrich Kersting . This is counteracted by the uniform lines, which rather point to the traces of the glass plate of the camera obscura or traces of the view through the prism of the camera lucida . According to the latest research, the use of tracing goes back to the painterly execution of the oil painting and not to its signature. Presumably Friedrich also used the break with the two women for the lost seascape with the moonrise . It is possible that the foreground is based on a lost drawing of the beach near Stubbenkammer, which must have been made on the Rügen trip in August 1818. The beach shown in the picture is characteristic of this area.

  • Caspar David Friedrich: Seated Man , around 1822

  • Caspar David Friedrich: Two Seated Women , around 1818

  • Stump chamber viewed from the beach

Provenance, designation, dating

The painting was created in 1822 as a counterpart to the village landscape with morning lighting for the banker Joachim Heinrich Wilhelm Wagener and was in his collection. It was acquired in 1861 from the collection that formed the basis for the Berlin National Gallery. According to the collection catalog from 1828, the painting was dated to 1823 until 1973. In the meantime, different classifications around 1810 or 1830 were not confirmed. A letter from Friedrich to Consul Wagner on November 1, 1822 announced that the two pictures would be delivered for the same month. For reasons unknown, the painter exhibited the paintings in April 1823 at the special exhibition on the occasion of the visit of the Bavarian royal couple in Dresden before they reached the recipient. There the painting had the title The evening, the beach at Stubbenkammer on the island of Rügen .

Classification in the complete work

As in many cases with Friedrich, the painting is preceded by a long story of motifs in which the image idea matured in its implementation. As early as 1821, a variant of the moon rising by the sea with two men standing in the center and two women sitting on a large stone on the right was created. Obviously the painter is wrestling with the form that he will achieve a year later. Even before 1818, in his paintings Farewell and Woman by the Sea, he was concerned with the woman pose on the boulder in symbolic communication with ships at sea. The painting Two Men by the Sea at the Moon Rise can also be seen as a preliminary stage for the composition . During the moonrise by the sea in 1822, the image was evidently determined by the image idea carried by the pair of images. In addition, the themes of moonrise by the sea, the stony sea beach and back figures are represented throughout the work.

  • Caspar David Friedrich: Two men by the sea , 1817

  • Caspar David Friedrich: Woman by the Sea before 1818

  • Caspar David Friedrich: Farewell , before 1818

  • Caspar David Friedrich: Moonrise over the Sea , 1821

literature

  • Helmut Börsch-Supan: Caspar David Friedrich . Prestel Verlag, Munich 1973
  • 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)
  • Hubertus Gaßner: For guidance . In: Caspar David Friedrich. The invention of modernity . Exhibition catalog Essen / Hamburg, 2006/2007
  • Christina Grummt: Caspar David Friedrich. The painting. The entire work . 2 vol., Munich 2011
  • Jens Christian Jensen: Caspar David Friedrich. Life and work. DuMont, Cologne 1995, ISBN 3-7701-0758-6
  • Peter Märker: Caspar David Friedrich. History as nature. Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg 2007
  • Wieland Schmid: Caspar David Friedrich. Cycle, time, eternity. Prestel Verlag, Munich 1999
  • Detlef Stapf: Caspar David Friedrich's hidden landscapes. The Neubrandenburg contexts . Greifswald 2014, network-based P-Book

Web links

Commons : Moonrise by the Sea  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter Märker: Caspar David Friedrich. History as nature. Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg 2007, 95
  2. ^ Willi Wolfradt: Caspar David Friedrich and the landscape of romanticism. Berlin 1924, pp. 24, 58, 125, 206
  3. ^ Jens Christian Jensen: Caspar David Friedrich. Life and work. DuMont Verlag, Cologne 1999, p. 184
  4. ^ Wieland Schmid: Caspar David Friedrich. Cycle, time, eternity. Prestel Verlag, Munich 1999, p. 48
  5. ^ Helmut Börsch-Supan: Caspar David Friedrich. Prestel Verlag, Munich 1973, p. 131
  6. ^ Marianne Fleischhack: Memoirs of a German Painter . Leipzig 1950, p. 437
  7. ^ Jens Christian Jensen: Caspar David Friedrich. Life and work. DuMont, Cologne 1995, ISBN 3-7701-0758-6 , p. 203
  8. ↑ Detlef Stapf: Caspar David Friedrichs hidden landscapes. The Neubrandenburg contexts . Greifswald 2014, pp. 59 f., 80, network-based P-Book
  9. ^ Wieland Schmid: Caspar David Friedrich. Cycle, time, eternity. Prestel Verlag, Munich 1999, p. 53
  10. ^ Peter Märker: Caspar David Friedrich. History as nature. Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg 2007, 95
  11. ↑ Klaus Lankheit: The friendship image of romanticism. Heidelberger Kunstgeschichtliche Abhandlungen NFI, Heidelberg 1952, pp. 102–105
  12. ↑ Christina Grummt: Caspar David Friedrich. The painting. The entire work . 2 vol., Munich 2011, p. 767 f.
  13. ↑ Christina Grummt: Caspar David Friedrich. The painting. The entire work . 2 vol., Munich 2011, p. 728
  14. ↑ Willi Geismeier: On the importance and developmental position of a feeling for nature and landscape representation in Caspar David Friedrich . Dissertation, Berlin 1966, SS 54
  15. ^ Werner Busch: Caspar David Friedrich. Aesthetics and Religion . Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2003, p. 52
  16. ↑ Christina Grummt: Caspar David Friedrich. The painting. The entire work . 2 vol., Munich 2011, p. 768
  17. ^ Werner Sumowski: Caspar David Friedrich studies. Franz Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden 1970, p. 130
  18. ^ 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. 368
  19. ^ 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. 346
  20. ^ A b 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. 347