Date: 12-05-2002
Owning Institution:
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: 19th Century        

Caspar David Friedrich is generally regarded as the finest German painter of the Romantic era. But his pictures have not often been seen in this country and only one, the National Gallery’s Winter Landscape of 1812, is to be found on display in a British museum. “German Art for Russian Imperial Palaces”, an exhibition which opened recently in the Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House, contains no fewer than eleven works by the artist. Today’s painting is my own favourite among them. The imminence of St Brendan the Navigator’s feast day, which falls next Thursday, also steered me towards it. The work is simply entitled On a Sailing-boat and it was painted towards the end of 1818.

Friedrich was forty-four years old at the time but he seems to have felt that in many respects his life was only just beginning. Two years earlier he had been elected to the Dresden Academy of Arts, a position which carried the modest but none the less significant annual salary of 150 thalers. The prospect of a regular income gave him the courage to propose marriage to the young woman with whom he had fallen in love, Caroline Bommer, the twenty-five year-old daughter of a Dresden dyer. She accepted, and the couple were wed at the beginning of 1818. “Since I has been changed into We many things have altered,” Friedrich wrote to relations in his native Greifswald, a small town on the coast of Pomerania. “There has been more eating, drinking, sleeping, talking, jesting and laughing.” In the summer of the same year, he took his bride home to meet his family. From Greifswald the honeymooning couple sailed to the popular destination of Rugen, where Friedrich had spent many childhood holidays. They passed their time walking and enjoying the windswept natural scenery of the island, with its dramatic chalk cliffs and views across the Baltic. On a Sailing-boat  was painted immediately on the couple’s return to Dresden.

Friedrich intended the painting, at least in part, as an allegory of his own happy frame of mind at this turning point in his life and career. Embarked cosily together on the ship of marriage, its sails swelled by love, husband and wife gaze with tranquil satisfaction into a sunlit future. Their destination is an imaginary coastal town of otherworldly beauty: an idealised albeit distinctly Germanic vision of a heavenly city, its Gothic spires trembling in the golden distance. Friedrich’s unusual and daringly fragmentary composition, in which the boat’s mainsail and bowsprit are cropped abruptly on the right-hand side, and its stern cut off by the bottom edge of the canvas, anticipates the much later innovations of the French Impressionists. It is a device which frames the scene from the viewpoint of the ship’s skipper and which therefore has the effect of drawing viewers into the painting. The boat itself has been depicted with every attention to detail (and was in fact based meticulously on an on-the-spot drawing of an actual sailing-boat, done in Rugen) although Friedrich’s symbolic frame of mind was so strong that it is difficult not to suspect each and every detail in his pictures of some emblematic undertow of meaning. The closely observed ship’s rigging, which criss-crosses the composition at so many points, does more than testify to the painter’s nautical know-how. It can also be seen as a pictorial metaphor for the ties that bind every married couple as they chart their course through life.

The figures in the boat are not actual portraits of Friedrich and Caroline, just as the seascape in which they have been placed and the town which lies ahead of them are entirely imaginary. This lends the picture a certain Everyman quality, which may have helped to persuade the Russian Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich, the future Tsar Nicholas I, to buy it during a visit to Friedrich’s studio in 1820. The aristocratic Russian art collector had himself recently got married, to Princess Charlotte of Russia, so perhaps he saw himself and his bride in the young couple sitting in the bows of Friedrich’s dream boat. The Tsar eventually gave the work pride of place in the main salon of one of his favourite royal retreats, the so-called Cottage at Peterhof.

The eventual destination of the picture may have struck Caspar David Friedrich as a little ironic, in the light of another aspect of its meaning. During and immediately after the Napoleonic Wars the painter, along with many of his closest friends, dared to dream of a united and democratic Germany freed from the rule of despots and tyrants. Such hopes had been dashed by the Congress of Vienna of 1815. The power of the Kings of Bavaria, Saxony and Prussia had been consolidated, and they imprisoned the most outspoken of the freedomfighters, while presiding over increasingly reactionary regimes. On a Sailing-Boat alludes not only to Friedrich’s marriage, but also perhaps to the persistence of a powerful but still subversive political idea. The young man in the bow of the boat wears a conspicuously alt-deutsch floppy hat, part of the recognised costume of the German patriotic movement. The city towards which he and his companion are headed is emphatically Gothic, the architectural style most closely associated with the patriotic ideal of a free and united Germany. So as well as enacting the parable of every man and wife, the couple in the painting are archetypes of democratic political idealism – travelling towards a world in whichmankind will no longer be , in Friedrich’s own words, “the minions of monarchs”. It seems highly unlikely that this message ever disturbed the complacency of Tsar Nicholas I and his wife, as they admired their new acquisition in their summer palace just outside St Petersburg.