“View of a Harbour”
This oil on canvas painting is by the German Romantic style artist, Caspar David Friedrich, and is titled “View of a Harbour”. It was created between 1815 and 1816. It depicts two ships prominently in the foreground in a busy harbor, with masts of ships seen all around the background. If you look closely, you may spot the faint semblance of a crescent moon in between the two main ships.
Harbors, ships, and the sea were a recurring theme in Friedrich’s repertoire of art. He was born in Greifswald, Germany, on the Baltic Sea, which at the time was part of the Swedish Pomerania. Friedrich started painting “View of a Harbour” the same year that the lands were transferred to Prussia after the Congress of Vienna. As a result, the harbors were bustling with activity.
Friedrich’s views on harbor life reflect the boom in trade and manufacturing that was happening in the Prussian/German states during this time. At the time that he painted this piece, he was living in Dresden in southern Germany.
Friedrich was unique in that he was able to marry human presence and activity with nature. Aided by the dissatisfaction with materialism, spirituality was going through a sort of renewal in popular culture at this time. Many artists, including Friedrich, were influenced by this. Nature, which was previously seen as akin to paganism, was reevaluated and humanity’s place in the world was reduced to scale.
“View of a Harbour” is currently in the collections of Schloss Sanssouci in Potsdam, Germany.
For more on Caspar David Friedrich, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
