Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century

by Sabine Rewald

During the first half of the 19th century, the open window emerged as a consistent motif in German, Danish, French, and Russian painting and drawing. Rooms with a View is the first book to explore this intriguing theme in European art, with its Romantic intimations of unfulfilled longing and its associated qualities of poetry, luminosity, and interiority. Artists depicted this intangible mood with images of contemplative figures in hushed, sparsely furnished rooms; painters diligently at work in their studios; simple, serene displays of light entering a chamber; and windows as the focal point of views in their own right. Rooms with a View features forty oils and thirty works on paper by both well-known and largely undiscovered artists, including Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Gustav Carus, Georg Friedrich Kersting, Adolph Menzel, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Martinus Rørbye, Jean Alaux, Léon Cogniet, and Fyodor Petrovich Tolstoy.

Genres: Art, History, Nonfiction

204 pages, Paperback

First published April 26, 2011

Reviews

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thematic monographs can be such a mixed bag: so much depends on the curator to articulate her ideas. Sabine Rewald (of NYC's Metropolitan Museum) gives only the slightest of introductions: a quote from Novalis plus a short summary of who painted what through which window. You'd think she'd have something to say about, I don't know, the open window as a popular trope in Enlightenment and Romantic thought. Nope. The commentary on the paintings is similarly underwhelming: I'm not blind, I can see what's in the painting—I don't need her to itemize every button and coat rack!