On the Sailing Boat

This painting, with its bold composition, was probably purchased by the future Tsar Nicholas I in 1820, when he visited Friedrich in Dresden.

As if we ourselves were on board, our eyes are directed towards the prow of the boat, where a couple are sitting. They are holding hands and gazing at the distant city ahead, its church spires and buildings emerging hazily from the mist. The woman is Caroline, the artist’s wife, and the man is probably intended to be Friedrich. The artist is possibly referring here to the motif of the ship of life, to the notion of life as a journey from this world to the next, as familiar from Christian pictorial and literary tradition. The picture is dominated, however, by the emotional span between the narrowness of the boat, the way in which it seems to be gliding soundlessly forwards, strangely without waves, and the longed-for horizon. Dominant, too, is the bold composition with its slightly offset verticals (the mast), its horizontals (the distant shore) and its foreshortened view of the wedge-like front of the ship. It would be several decades before a close-up view of this kind would be encountered again in the work of the Impressionists.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes):

Franz Schubert: Auf Dem Wasser Zu Singen (To Be Sung On The Water), Franz Liszt’s transcription