Image source: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain). View source
The Monk by the Sea
Caspar David Friedrich · Romanticism & Landscape
- Artist
- Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)
- Date
- 1808–1810
- Dimensions
- 110 x 171.5 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany
The Monk by the Sea shows a tiny figure of a monk standing on a pale strip of dune, facing a vast, dark sea beneath an immense, empty sky. There is nothing else: no ship, no tree, no horizon to hold on to.
A closer look
Friedrich radically simplified the composition into three horizontal bands of sand, water and sky, with the sky taking up nearly four-fifths of the canvas. The lone figure, seen from behind, invites us to share his experience of standing before the infinite. X-rays show that Friedrich originally painted boats on the sea and then removed them, increasing the sense of emptiness. Contemporaries were bewildered; the writer Heinrich von Kleist said that looking at it was like having one's eyelids cut off. Today it is seen as a forerunner of abstract art.
History of the painting
Friedrich showed the painting at the Berlin Academy exhibition of 1810 together with its companion, The Abbey in the Oakwood. At the request of the fifteen-year-old crown prince, the future Frederick William IV, King Frederick William III of Prussia bought both pictures, and they stayed in the royal palaces until they passed to the Berlin state museums; today they hang side by side in the Alte Nationalgalerie.
