Snow-covered hut
Snow-covered hut is the title of a small painting by Caspar David Friedrich from 1827, the time of romanticism in the visual arts. In 1960 it came to the Berlin National Gallery and is now shown in the restored building of the Old National Gallery on Berlin's Museum Island .
Image content, interpretation and review
The picture, painted in the format 31 × 25 cm in the technique of oil on canvas, shows a snow-covered shelter from wicker and undergrowth. The door is off its hinges, the shelter looks deserted. With its symmetrical triangular shape in the center of the picture and its integration into the environment, it looks like a kind of elevation or mound with a dark, unlocked entrance.
This abandoned hut that no longer offers the shepherd security is not an idyllic set piece in this picture, but the main motif. It is optically matched to the environment and can thus be seen in its transience as part of nature, from whose material it was built. With the reduction to a few colors and shapes, Friedrich created a parable of transience, loneliness and death. The man-made plant stands for the inanimate in contrast to the willows in the background, which turn green again in spring.
During that time, Caspar David painted several small-format winter landscapes in which actually insignificant motifs are in the foreground in order to emphasize their symbolic power. A similar hut can also be seen in his painting Ruins at Dusk from 1831. On the occasion of the Dresden exhibition of 1827, the Leipzig literary magazine Blätter für literary entertainment said: His two small pieces, the “dilapidated hut” under the snow and the “dark vault”, are composed in the same spirit and are reminiscent of similarly short episodes in Ossian's chants .
Provenance and exhibition
The snow-covered hut was first shown in the Dresden Academy Exhibition in 1827. Prince Johann von Sachsen bought the picture there. In 1924 it came to the Dresden art dealer Rusch, in 1928 it was bought by Hugo Salm, from 1933 it was in South America, then in the Berlin art trade, finally in private ownership. In 1960 it was acquired for the National Gallery with funds from the German Class Lottery in Berlin . Since then it has had the inventory number: NG 9/60 .
From 1986 to 2001 the picture was shown in the Knobelsdorff Wing in Berlin's Charlottenburg Palace in what was then the Galerie der Romantik ; since the renovation of the Alte Nationalgalerie was completed in 2001, it has been exhibited in the Friedrichsaal there .
literature
- Helmut Börsch-Supan , Karl Wilhelm Jähnig: Caspar David Friedrich, paintings, prints and pictorial drawings , Prestel Munich 1973, ISBN 3-7913-0053-9
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hans Gerhard Hannessen: Paintings of the German Romanticism in the National Gallery Berlin, Frölich & Kaufmann, Berlin 1985, p. 46
- ↑ Catalog of the exhibition Caspar David Friedrich - 10 paintings , Munich 1984, No. 7
- ↑ Leaves for literary entertainment , Leipzig 1827, p. 916
- ↑ website bildindex.de