Monk by the Sea
Who painted Monk by the Sea?
What interpretations exist for Monk by the Sea?
How has Caspar David Friedrich’s reputation evolved?
Monk by the Sea, painting in oil on canvas created by German artist Caspar David Friedrich between 1808 and 1810. Its depiction of a man dwarfed by the starkness and magnitude of nature captures the loneliness of the human condition and the mystery and enormity of the surrounding universe.
History of the painting
For most of his career, Friedrich was lauded for his landscapes. Early on he produced a great quantity of drawings, etchings, and sepias. Monk by the Sea is one of his earliest oil paintings and also one of his largest, at 3.61 × 5.63 feet (110 × 171.5 cm). Friedrich first exhibited the painting in 1810, at the Berlin Academy, along with Abbey in the Oak Wood (1809/10), a companion piece he created about the same time. The purchase of both artworks by Frederick William III, king of Prussia, at the recommendation of his son was Friedrich’s career breakthrough.
Description
The monk of the title is not easy to find. He is a lone minuscule figure standing on a barren coast, facing a black sea with frothing waves under a stormy-looking sky. He wears a floor-length hooded brown robe—the attire of a monk—and has long blond hair resembling the artist’s own locks. The figure is turned away from the viewer, a compositional device called Rückenfigur (German: “back figure”). It was frequently used by Friedrich to invite viewers to follow the subject’s gaze and observe the landscape for themselves.
The painting perplexed contemporary viewers for its austerity: its landscape essentially comprises three horizontal bands making up the sky, sea, and coast. It has no framing device, such as a building or foliage, to control its sense of scale, and, as a consequence, the landscape seemingly extends beyond the canvas. German author Heinrich von Kleist likened viewing the apparently boundless work to having had “one’s eyelids…cut away.” Moreover, Friedrich set the horizon line low, allowing the sky to take up as much as three-quarters of the canvas. He thus emphasized the expansiveness of the atmosphere and the diminutiveness of the man. Friedrich painted the scene by using one or two very thin layers, likely over a drawing, and deepened the colors of the sky from light and hazy at the top of the canvas to rich velvet blues closer to the horizon line. The setting has been identified as the island of Rügen, off the northeastern coast of Germany. Friedrich, who spent much of his life in Dresden (about 255 miles [410 km] inland from Rügen), in Saxony, was known to travel the city’s environs, seeking inspiration in nature.
Interpretations
Interpretations of the lone monk contemplating the sea and sky are varied. Many scholars describe Monk by the Sea as a reflection of the Romantic era’s emphasis on the sublime in nature. By depicting the enormity of the landscape, Friedrich may have attempted to inspire the awe that individuals experience when faced with something they cannot fully comprehend. Some scholars equate this transcendental sensation with a religious experience. Friedrich was indeed a religious man, and he is thought to have suffused his art with spiritual symbolism. His landscapes as well as those of his fellow Romanticists helped the landscape genre gain respect, in part because of their use of nature to suggest the presence of God and to convey other feelings about religion.
A few historians have read Monk by the Sea’s murky sky and frothing waves as ominous, as if death or danger is approaching. They see the monk as pondering his own mortality, perhaps feeling the terror that there may be no God but instead a meaningless void. Other scholars have suggested that the painting’s threatening storm echoes Friedrich’s pessimism about the turmoil in his homeland during this period. He painted Monk by the Sea amid the Napoleonic Wars (1800–15), during which France occupied Saxony beginning in 1806. In several of his other works, Friedrich expressed his nationalist feelings through subtle means, sometimes dressing figures in traditional German garb.
Legacy
Friedrich’s work was widely popular for a period after the sale of Monk by the Sea and Abbey in the Oak Wood. By 1825, however, his art had begun to fall out of favor. Indeed, the previous year, Friedrich had been overlooked for a position as a landscape painting teacher at the academy in Dresden—a slight that he saw as a rejection by official opinion. The artist was nearly paralyzed after a stroke in 1837 and died in poverty in 1840, having spent his final years surviving on the charity of friends. His art was largely forgotten in subsequent decades, though some interest in his work was generated by a show at the National Gallery (Nationalgalerie; now the Old National Gallery [Alte Nationalgalerie]) in Berlin in 1906. Adolf Hitler’s admiration for the German Romantic artists, including Friedrich, caused museums and collectors to shy away from Friedrich in the years immediately following World War II. It was not until 1972 that a showing of Friedrich’s work at London’s Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) brought him to new international audiences. By 2024 a number of museums had put on exhibitions celebrating the 250th anniversary of his birth. The following year saw the first comprehensive exhibition of Friedrich’s work in the United States. Held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, it featured approximately 75 pieces, including Monk by the Sea.
In the centuries after their creation, both Monk by the Sea and Abbey in the Oak Wood passed from the royal collection to the State Palaces and Gardens Foundation, Berlin, in 1928 and then to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in 1957. Between 2013 and 2016 the Old National Gallery, where both paintings are housed, undertook a conservation and restoration project. Using infrared imaging on Monk by the Sea revealed a few surprises. One was the presence of two ships on the horizon that Friedrich had painted over.
Although public interest in Friedrich has reemerged only in the last 50 years, his influence may be seen in the somber elegance of Edvard Munch’s and Mark Rothko’s art.