The Monk by the Sea

The Monk by the Sea is a painting by Caspar David Friedrich. It was built 1808-1810 in Dresden and was issued along with the image Abbey in the Oak Forest at the Berlin Academy exhibition of 1810. At the request of the artist, the images were not side by side but above the other hung Monk by the Sea should hang over the Abbey in the Oak Forest. After the exhibition, the two images of King Friedrich Wilhelm III were. bought for his collection. Today, the paintings are next to each other in the Old National Gallery in Berlin.

Formation

The picture was taken at a time first public recognition and success for Frederick. Mainly, the discussion about the Děčínská altar had made him known to a wider audience. The image evoked both appreciation and rejection. The Monk by the Sea boosted his success on and attracted great attention.

Although Frederick images depicting natural landscapes, he composed and painted it in his studio. However, for this he used resulting outdoor sketches. He took these individual elements and put them back together, in order to achieve a certain mood or a feeling in the viewer. The Monk by the Sea, he removed items from his image construction. He swept the canvas freely downright.

Friedrich has probably started the painting The Monk by the Sea 1808 in Dresden. In a letter of February 1809, he first described the picture. The emergence in different phases of visitors was documented. In June 1809, described a woman of Kügelgen, a friend of Frederick, the quiet sky on the image Monk by the Sea. From later investigations it is known that he had initially painted two small sailing ships on the horizon, but this remote again. Friedrich has repeatedly changed slightly the image to show in his compositions. However, the basic structure was probably always the same.

Motif

A single person, dressed in a frock and an arm on the chin, stands on a partially grassy dune. The person identified by most as the monk, the viewer faces almost the back and looks at a rough sea and an almost featureless sky. The sky takes up about three-fourths of the image. It is unclear whether he is standing on a high cliff or only on a gentle slope to the sea. The dune forms in the screen layout a blunt triangle, the most protruding at the height of the person in the picture. In addition to the monk there are still 14 seagulls on the image. A seagull sits a few meters to the right of the monk who fly the other, diagonally upwards to the right, away from him.

Effect

The Monk by the Sea seemed disturbing for many viewers. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe showed in a first reaction admiration for the Landscapes of Frederick, however, felt a little later so irritated by the emptiness of the image that he spoke of wanting to smash it best over a table edge.

A romantic and ironic approach, less of the image than at the Visitors wrote Clemens Brentano 1810 under the title: Various sensations in front of a seascape by Friedrich, followed by a Capuchin. In a polyphonic exchange drives Brentano word games like Ossian and ocean or from the horrors of a viewer, a gray of the other; also worth reading today piece about museum visitors.

Heinrich von Kleist, who was a personal friend of Frederick, published some time later, in his capacity as editor of the Berliner evening leaves the text in a redacted form by himself, entitled sensations to Frederick seascape.

Through his editorship of the original romantic character of the text is included only in the passages that literally come from the pen of Brentano. Kleist, however, speaks of apocalypse and boundlessness. He seems to make fun of the romantic view of the Brentano - text and ends his text with the words: " ... it is when you look at it, as if one 's eyelids were cut away ."

Kleist saw himself compelled weeks later to a public apology.