I’ve seen a lot of painting in my life, but just several paintings that always remains in my memory. it feels like I don’t really fancy something that so visual pleasing and more into some stange artwork, but romanticism painting just have a special place in my heart.
People sometimes prefer realism painting that very slick and clean as a silk, or edgy Basquiat style that people tend to loved, or a majestic sexy Renaissance one, but I’m the one with the others that love to see the message behind thing that they called stupid art, but somehow it is more deep than it is.
But sometimes people tend to search some art that embodied the feels of sublime or some feelings that make them moved, and I’m more doing that often. But again... in the end of the day it all depends on you.
Back to Romantic art, I think it is perfectly show in this quote
“all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror, leads to the sublime.”
Most of the painting in here captured the nature, they said nature with is uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes, offered an alternative to the ordered world of enlightenment thought. And the violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by romantic artist recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the sublime. A central notion of Romanticism asserted the originality of the artist and emphasis on imagination and emotion.
And as the representation of the true embodiment of German Romantic Style is the artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840).
At the first glance Friedrich’s work is just a mere landscape, view that somewhat muted in tone while others include a couple, a person or rarely a small group of people engaged in nothing, nothing more engaging than sitting by a fire, or just standing and looking but that’s what makes him special.
A group of people, the landscape or person that standing could be something more, Friedrich infused the landscape painting with deep religious and spiritual significance, he can featured sunlight to be a beautiful power of divine, somehow his work more like a German people icon, an iconography that can only be understood in the context of German history.
Let’s approaching to one of the beautiful painting that he made, a lovely “women at the window “ 1882.
We see a beautiful single figure from behind, the thing that we often see in many of friedrich’s painting, a single figure from behind. The women in the painting is his wife and as smarthistory said his wife is in his studio in Dreden.
The view is not just the back of the women, but we can see behind the women, she is looking out across the River Elbe to the other side. And somehow it makes me wondering, What she feels while looking out? We can just imagine what her eyes see in there and just hypnotized by it. it lead us to not just look at one point, and look to what she is looking. Is there something that she’s looking for? or she just stay in there watching the landscape of river? or she just want to daydreaming?
The amazing thing about the painting is in the details, if we look closer to this painting, we can see the scenery in the window is just like seeing a small view of outside world.
What we cleary see in here is appears to be a port, with some ships, a small coastline and some trees and the vast blue sky above, the blue sky above her is framed in the window above her that looks very captivating that she does seem as if her world is inside this room and her only access outside is through this window.
There is kind of symbolism here that show up, mentioned the port, the mast that placed on the right that’s close seems to be moving, you get the sense that the ship is passing slowly and it becomes such a metaphor for her life, as she watches life pass before her and the ships that she looks at will move on, and she will remain where she is, and we wonder if she’s feeling a sense of longing for more, or that perhaps she is expressing a more generalized sense of longing or desire for meaning that we often see in a lot of other paintings by Friedrich.
There’s a sense of quiet and contemplative in this painting. The technique here is amazing too, the blue sky that mentioned lately is very soft that seems so translucent that makes the woman seem potent and because of the exposed interior of the studio is consists of strict horizontal and verticals it makes the figure of the woman is the only signs of life.
The little things that wonderful is the woman’s dress, the way the color shines and the way it picks up a kind of interior light, also the liquids that are in the bottles on the right reminds of some perfect still life painting that seems so warm and softly lit.
There are many things that makes this painting captivating, the way Friedrich represent the story, feels, mood, it seems like he invite us to come to his world, invite us to feel something that he shared in the painting, invite us to come to enter the woman’s mind and woman’s mood, it seems when we look at her posture then we look at this room we can immadiately inhabit in her experience in a way that feels very genuine. Caspar David Friedrich created an emotional connection with the viewer rather than a more literal interaction with the scene.
As poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.”