Stop and Look – Caspar David Friedrich’s Chalk Cliffs on Rügen
The German painter Caspar David Friedrich is particularly well known for his depictions of solitary, contemplative young people coming to terms with the beauties of nature. So it’s surprising that this remarkable picture was not recognised as his work until as late as 1920.
Since that time, it has become an icon of German Romantic landscape, embodying many of the elements characteristic of that moment in art history. One important feature is the fact that it depicts not a solitary admirer of nature, but a small group of young people, all evidently responding to the scene before them in their own individual way, but all, also, evidently friends sharing their feelings and contributing different insights to the collective experience.
It is significant that Friedrich often shows us two people, clearly intimate friends, opening their eyes and their minds fresh to the wonders of the world around them. The young man on the right here is a student wearing the Renaissance cap, forbidden by the authorities, of radical free-thinkers who adopted historic costume to signify their liberation from bourgeois convention. While he gazes far out to sea, the young woman points to the brilliantly white cliffs with their strangely eroded forms, while the third figure has flung himself down on the ground and peers microscopically at the grasses growing at the very lip of the precipice.
Friedrich’s tendency to use symbols in his work has encouraged commentators to elaborate many fantasies about this haunting picture. But if it is symbolic, its meaning is surely not hard to decipher. I don’t think those little boats need to be seen as angels floating heavenwards. They are angelic enough as white sails hardly moving on a wonderfully calm blue sea. The island of Rügen lies off the north coast of Germany and provided a visitor like Friedrich, from the inland state of Saxony, with a glimpse of expanses of water that held their own mystery. And, on a still summer day must have seemed like the entrance to an eternally motionless enchantment, opening out from the shining chalk gateway of the cliffs, with their frame of delicately laced leaves and branches.
Friendship and inward meditation are presented by Friedrich here, as in many of his landscapes, as a delicate balance, a harmonious pairing of human states: the solitary experience heightened by interaction with congenial minds, the social enriched by distancing from others. And, on another scale, the infinity of sea and sky set off against the minute detail of weeds and flowers. We may be reminded of that most solitary of the English Romantic poets, William Blake:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
