Wish list: Rooms with a view

An exhibition:



Rooms with a View,


The Open Window in the 19th Century



From April 5, 2011 till July 4, 2011



at the Metropolitan Museum, New York



(not happening, to me at least)



"Everything at a distance turns into poetry: distant mountains, distant people, distant events: all become Romantic."



Novalis, 1798

Adolph Menzel (German, 1815–1905)

The Artist's Bedroom in Ritterstrasse, 1847

Franz Ludwig Catel (German, 1788–1856)

A View of Naples through a Window, 1824

Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840)

Woman at the Window, 1822

Georg Friedrich Kersting (German, 1785–1847)

Caspar David Friedrich in His Studio, 1811

Georg Friedrich Kersting (German, 1785–1847)

In Front of the Mirror, 1827

Georg Friedrich Kersting (German, 1785–1847)

Young Woman Sewing by Lamplight, 1823

Georg Friedrich Kersting (German, 1785–1847)

Woman Embroidering, 1811

Giovanni Battista de Gubernatis (Italian, 1774–1837)

The Artist's Studio in Parma, 1812

Jakob Alt (Austrian, 1789–1872)

View from the Artist's Studio in the Alservorstadt toward Dornbach, 1836

Léon Cogniet (French, 1794–1880)

The Artist in His Room at the Villa Medici, Rome, 1817

Léon Matthieu Cochereau (French, 1793–1817)

The Artist in His Studio, ca. 1812–15

Martinus Rørbye (Danish, 1803–1848)

View from the Artist's Window, 1825

This exhibition focuses on a subject treasured by the Romantics: the view through an open window. German, French, Danish, and Russian artists first took up the theme in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Juxtaposing near and far, the window is a metaphor for unfulfilled longing. Painters distilled this feeling in pictures of hushed, spare rooms with contemplative figures; studios with artists at work; and open windows as the sole motif. As the exhibition reveals, these pictures may shift markedly in tone, yet they share a distinct absence of the anecdote and narrative that characterized earlier genre painting.

From metmuseum.org

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