BLECHEN, Karl

This picture is an impression of the wild region of the Bode Valley in the Harz mountains. The pencil sketch was drawn from nature and later worked up into a more complex picture.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 43 minutes):

Schubert: Songs, transcripted for piano by Franz Liszt

At first sight the picture seems full of mystery, indeed it creates a sense of unease. The very title seems designed to evoke a shudder, and this impression is strengthened by the darkening evening with its long shadows, and above all, the building crane, which looks like a gallows. The viewer may well be attracted to the Romantic mood of the painting, but the true message is clear, and it is rather sombre. Man is bringing even the most distant and seemingly inaccessible regions under control through civilization and technical advance, and he is mastering the aspects of nature that have till now seemed unapproachable and fearful. But there is also allegory here - it is in the reference to transience. The new bridge that is being built will one day be as crumbling as the old one is now.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 13 minutes):

Luigi Boccherini: Symphony in D minor (The House of the Devil

In 1828 Blechen went to Italy for a journey that unleashed a flood of new images, including many beach scenes, such as the pictures of Neapolitan fisherfolk.

Far away from the Frenchified classical grandeur of Frederick the Great, for whom the Sanssouci Palace was built in Potsdam, is the bourgeois apparatus of Frederick William III, seen in his “Gothic Moroccan” Palm Court on the on the Pfaueninsel (Peacock Island, an island situated in the Havel river near the Berlin Wannsee). Designed in an opulent late Regency style, this building is a reminder of the many marital and cultural links between Prussia and England.

The Palm Court was unusually realistically recorded in Blechen’s canvas commissioned in 1832 by the arch-conservative king as a gift for his daughter, the Czarina Charlotte. Her collection of German nineteenth-century art is mostly in The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

This is one of Blechen’s deft, Impressionistic scenes.

This youthful self-portrait shows Blechen long before his life ended at forty-two, after seven years devastated by progressive disease of the nervous system. He died insane in 1840.

In 1828 Blechen went to Italy for a journey that unleashed a flood of new images. His Stormy Weather over the Roman Campagna is boldly, speedily sketched in oil. It shows the ruins of an ancient aqueduct threading its way along the plain, the snowcapped Alban mountains in the background. Shattered, the elevated waterway suggests a Titanic battle between the forces of humanity and nature, with the latter, as usual, the winner. Elongated in format, this view recalls the vistas of seventeenth-century Dutch masters.

This is one of Blechen’s several studies of a funerary monument, suggesting grandeur and pathos.

After 1829-29 Blechen’s impressions of his travels in Italy were already taking him to the verge of naturalism.Occasionally his effects are theatrical, but these derive from the drama of nature itself, like the coming thunderstorm in this picture.

The Berlin painter Carl Blechen returned from a visit to Italy where, like many young artists, he had practised outdoor oil sketching, to paint very freely handled park and woodland scenes such as The Woods near Spandau.

Corot was in Rome at the time of Blechen’s Italian travels. Both painters working ‘en plein air’, and new freedom shaped their art. An inevitable view of the Tivoli Gardens at the Villa d’Este escapes the clich�d aspects of that setting.

The painting depicts the monastery and basilica of San Francesco in the religious pilgrimage town of Assisi in Umbria, the birthplace of St Francis of Assisi.

This view by Blechen is typical of the earlier-nineteenth-century concern with urban landscapes. It was sketched in Potsdam, so close to, yet far from, the palaces there.