With the painting "The Monk by the Sea" (written between 1808 and 1810 and also known under the title "Wanderer on the shore of the sea") Caspar David Friedrich breaks not only with the continuity of his own work, but with the entire landscape painting of his time ,

If we only consider the choice of motif, Frederick's recurring patterns emerge. The painting shows a dune, very bare and in the color beige to whitish, which seems in the left half of the picture into the lake or the sea seems. The surface of the water is almost black in color and above the horizon, it fumes like clouds of fog into the cloud layer, so that a transition from water to clouds is barely visible. Towards the sky, the gradient changes smoothly into a dark blue. Although we can imagine the sunlight behind the dense clouds, the time of day remains hidden from us.

The painting is dominated horizontally, only the monk standing on the small hill on the left forms a vertical line. As in Frederick's most famous painting "The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog", this is a back figure that expresses the hopeless quality of space in the transcendental hopelessness in the encounter of man and nature. The enigmatic and for his time so radical appearance receives the painting through the lack of spatial depth. Shore, water and sky are layered without any spatial transition, creating the impression of a surface and it lacks the time-classic frame show, which gave the images of the time depth and accessibility.

The interpretations of images have meanwhile assumed an unmanageable number in the history of art. Whether the image speaks of the consciousness of being at the mercy of the dark, unquestionable forces of nature and history, or whether it is only about a monk left by God, ultimately remains in the balance.

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Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich. Available as an art print on canvas, photo paper, watercolor board, uncoated paper or Japanese paper.
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