gandalf1202: Vilhelm Hammershøi – Sun over the Sea [c.1902] on…
Vilhelm Hammershøi – Sun over the Sea [c.1902] on Flickr.
The picture leaves much open to interpretation, but both compositionally and in feel it takes on the spiritual connotations of the German Romantic landscapes painted a hundred years earlier. As in the marines and landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, the sun may denote hope, the cross-shaped masts of the moored ships reaching for the skies a bridge between earth and heaven. Hammershøi often sought inspiration from the past, most notably from Vermeer in his interiors, and the work of the German Romantics and Danish Golden painters had a deep resonance throughout northern Germany and Scandinavia. And yet, with the uncompromisingly cropped ships and its horizontal tonal layers, Sun over the Sea is at the same time extremely modern in its conception, an aesthetic with no narrative, akin to the watery nocturnes of Hammershøi’s contemporary James McNeill Whistler whose work he so admired but to his great regret an artist he never met.
[Sotheby’s, London – Oil on canvas, 54 x 75 cm]
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1xpAoQv.
