Tomorrow in the Giant Mountains

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Caspar David Friedrich: Tomorrow in the Giant Mountains

Tomorrow in the Giant Mountains is the title of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich from 1810 or 1811, the time of romanticism in the visual arts. The Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III. acquired the picture in 1812 from Caspar David Friedrich for his royal palace on Unter den Linden in Berlin. Until 2001, the work was shown as part of the Gallery of Romanticism in the Knobelsdorff wing in Charlottenburg Palace . Since then it has been located in the New Pavilion in the Charlottenburg Palace Park.

Image content and interpretation

The picture, painted in the technique of oil on canvas, with the horizontal format 108 × 170 cm, shows a scene from the Giant Mountains . From a slightly elevated position, the viewer sees a rocky top with a cross bearing a figure of Jesus. A woman in a white dress has just climbed the top of the rock, is holding onto the cross with her right hand and is pulling a man in black with her left. The morning sun shines on the scene from the left in reddish-orange light. The morning mist is still in the valleys, only the mountain peaks, which are closely stacked one behind the other, rise above this sea of fog . But no summit towers above the horizon line, only the cross with the Jesus figure on the rocky summit in the foreground extends into the sky.

Georg Friedrich Kersting: CD Friedrich on the hike in the Giant Mountains , pencil drawing, 1810

In the summer of 1810, Caspar David Friedrich went on a hike through the Giant Mountains with his friend Georg Friedrich Kersting . Two of the drawings made on the way from July 11th and 17th, 1810 have been preserved, but other sketches are also associated with the picture. The picture Morgen im Riesengebirge was taken after Friedrich returned to his Dresden studio. The sea of ​​fog can definitely be compared with Friedrich's pictures of the Baltic Sea. The smooth horizon line divides the picture exactly in half into the two levels of heaven and earth, which give this allegorically exaggerated landscape an immeasurable breadth. The morning mist of the valleys allows the mountains to merge into an almost monochrome surface throughout the entire picture, only the tip of the rock with the summit cross is painted in light color. In this picture Friedrich follows an individual feeling, a mountain experience, not the church teaching, the turning to Jesus and the experience of the immensity of the earthly landscape are shown in this picture as an experience of equal value.

The reviewer of the Dresden Academy Exhibition in 1811 wrote in the Journal des Luxus und der Moden that the male figure Caspar David himself, and like the woman, was painted by his colleague Kersting. The Friedrich expert Helmut Börsch-Supan does not see women as a real person, but as an allegory of faith and religiosity. The art historian Klaus Lankheit recognizes in the picture a correspondence with Friedrich Schleiermacher , according to which the woman is the beloved who leads up to God .

Provenance and exhibition

King Friedrich Wilhelm III. von Prussia acquired the painting Morgen im Riesengebirge in 1811 at the Dresden academy exhibition for his Berlin palace on Unter den Linden . It hung there until 1837 and was then moved to the New Palace in Potsdam. From 1844 to 1865 it was part of the facility in Bellevue Palace , later in Wiesbaden Palace . After 1930 the picture returned to Berlin and hung in the Berlin City Palace . In 1957 it passed from the administration of the State Palaces and Gardens , Charlottenburg Palace (inventory number GK I 6911) to the possession of the State Museums of Prussian Cultural Heritage (inventory number NG 10/85).

The picture Morgen im Riesengebirge was shown from 1986 onwards in the Knobelsdorff wing in Charlottenburg Palace in what was then the Galerie der Romantik ; since 2001 it has been in the New Pavilion in the Charlottenburg Palace Park.

Web link

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Günter Grundmann: The Riesengebirge in the Painting of Romanticism , Munich 1958, p. 75 ff.
  2. ↑ Hans Gerhard Hannessen: Paintings of the German Romanticism in the National Gallery Berlin , Frölich & Kaufmann, Berlin 1985, p. 26
  3. ↑ Journal des Luxus und der Moden , Volume 26, Dresden 1811, p. 371
  4. ^ Helmut Börsch-Supan: The paintings CD Friedrichs in the Schinkel Pavilion. From Berlin castles , small writings, Volume II, Berlin 1973, p. 21 ff.
  5. ↑ Klaus Lankheit: CD Friedrich und der Neuprotestantismus , German quarterly journal for literary studies and intellectual history, 24th year, 1950, p. 138
  6. ↑ website image index
  7. ^ Page of the district office of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf