1810, Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) (special exhibition)
From the museum label:
For the Romantics, monks exemplified mystical insight. Friedrich wrote that his depiction of a monk contemplating a stormy sea represents "the unknowable hereafter ... the darkness of the future! Which is only ever sacred intuition, to be seen and recognized only in belief."
The scene is radical in its stark emptiness. Infrared imaging shows that the artist initially sketched ships offshore (see below), but he later eliminated them. With only whitecaps and wheeling gulls on the horizon, there is little to orient the viewer.
In 1810 Friedrich exhibited the painting in Berlin, then capital of the German state of Prussia. The sense of gazing into an infinite void astonished viewers. One writer described the picture as "like the apocalypse... when a person beholds it, it is as if his eyelids had been cut off." The Prussian king, however, purchased Monk by the Sea and its companion piece, Abbey in the Oak Wood.
1810, Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) (special exhibition)
From the museum label:
For the Romantics, monks exemplified mystical insight. Friedrich wrote that his depiction of a monk contemplating a stormy sea represents "the unknowable hereafter ... the darkness of the future! Which is only ever sacred intuition, to be seen and recognized only in belief."
The scene is radical in its stark emptiness. Infrared imaging shows that the artist initially sketched ships offshore (see below), but he later eliminated them. With only whitecaps and wheeling gulls on the horizon, there is little to orient the viewer.
In 1810 Friedrich exhibited the painting in Berlin, then capital of the German state of Prussia. The sense of gazing into an infinite void astonished viewers. One writer described the picture as "like the apocalypse... when a person beholds it, it is as if his eyelids had been cut off." The Prussian king, however, purchased Monk by the Sea and its companion piece, Abbey in the Oak Wood.