Two men by the sea
Two men by the sea is the title of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich from 1817, which belongs to the period of Romanticism in the visual arts. The picture has been in the possession of the Berlin National Gallery since 1936 and has been shown in the Alte Nationalgalerie building since 2001 .
Image content and interpretation
The painting, executed in the painting technique oil on canvas , with the format 51 × 66 cm shows two men of different ages in traditional German costumes , standing on the shores of the Baltic Sea, looking at the moonrise. The cloudy sky arches above them in the form of a light-filled symmetrical dome. The rising moon is almost exactly at the point of the carefully constructed central perspective in the middle of the picture. The Friedrich expert Helmut Börsch-Supan identified a strip of shore on the island of Rügen, near Stubbenkammer , as the location of the scene .
In this picture, Caspar David Friedrich does not want to point to a specific place, but to the visionary anticipation of the divine in the experience of nature . His intention is not to capture nature in a realistic way, but to elevate it to a metaphor . The picture is the first in a series of paintings and drawings that Friedrich created with this motif, two paintings in 1821 and 1830/35 and two pencil sepia drawings from 1835 and 1837. The figures from behind , a motif that often recurs in his pictures, are shown here as an equal couple. Werner Hofmann, former director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle , wrote in the Hamburg exhibition catalog in 1974 that the people in Friedrich's pictures were essential components of the sacred picture structure and secular monks or anchors who neither carry out profane acts nor show themselves ready for conversation.
The painter equates the experience of this sacred process of the rising of the moon with the experience of a church service. The background for Caspar David Friedrich's world of thought is the Protestant theology of his time. He was particularly influenced by the writings of Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten and Friedrich Schleiermacher . Since the two men portrayed have no individual personality whatsoever, the viewer who is ready to get involved in the picture must identify with them. Men's clothing is an important indication of the painter's mindset. Both wear the so-called old German costume , cycling coat and beret. In the time after the Wars of Liberation , when German unification was far from in sight, it is the symbol of a patriotic attitude, which saw a backward-looking utopia in the Middle Ages as the model for unification.
Provenance and exhibition
Caspar David Friedrich's Men by the Sea was first shown at the Dresden Academy Exhibition in 1817, where it is said to have been bought from the painter by an ancestor of Matron Mara Richter from Berlin, the last owner. In 1936 it went to the National Gallery, since then it has had the inventory number A II 884 (previously NG H 5) . The picture hung in Charlottenburg Palace until 1967 ; in 1986 it was moved to the Knobelsdorff wing of the palace and was exhibited in the then Romantic Gallery . Since 2001 it has been shown in the renovated old National Gallery on Berlin's Museum Island in the Friedrichsaal .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Helmut Börsch-Supan, Karl Wilhelm Jähnig: Caspar David Friedrich, paintings, prints and pictorial drawings , Munich 1973, nos. 90 to 93.
- ^ Helmut Börsch-Supan, Karl Wilhelm Jähnig: Caspar David Friedrich, paintings, prints and pictorial drawings , Munich 1973, No. 281, 406, 478 and 479.
- ^ Werner Hofmann: exhibition catalog, Hamburg 1974, p. 76.
- ↑ Hans Gerhard Hannessen: Paintings of the German Romanticism in the National Gallery Berlin, Frölich & Kaufmann, Berlin 1985, p. 28.
- ↑ website bildindex.de .