“View of a Harbour”
“View of a Harbour” is an oil on canvas painting by the German Romantic style artist, Caspar David Friedrich. Painted between 1815 and 1816, Friedrich beautifully depicts a harbor. Two ships stand prominently in the foreground. It is a busy harbor, with numerous masts of ships visible in the background. If you look closely, you may spot the faint semblance of a crescent moon in between the masts of the two main ships.
Harbors, ships, and the sea were a recurring theme in Friedrich’s art repertoire. 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 and German states during this time. When he painted this, he was living in Dresden in southern Germany, located on the Elbe River.
Friedrich was unique in that he was able to marry human presence and activity with nature. Brought on by the dissatisfaction with materialism, spirituality was having a revival in popular culture. Many artists, including Friedrich, were influenced by spirituality and it inspired their art. 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.
