Caspar David Friedrich (1774-11840). Oil on canvas, 96.7 x 126.9 cm. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
A collossal spear jutting out of the depths of the ocean. A finger that scars the landscape and points to God's creation. A funerary monument carved by ice and wind to mark the resting place of the crew of a sunken ship, its stern barely visible on the right... This scene conjures up all sorts of ideas, but all remind us of a furious, primeval force as terrifying as it is beautiful.
Strong diagonals cross the canvas -the main projection is echoed in the background and its sides-, reinforcing a sense of motion and agressiveness; you can almost hear the ice cracking and swallowing the wooden boat. The clear blue skies and the smooth ice sheets reveal Friedrich's masterful technique: the heaps and masses are treated individually, their jagged edges glittering in the sunlight, each of them in a unique tone, some are translucent blue or resemble marble and stone rather than ice, especially the brownish blocks in the lower foreground -probably as a result of Friedrich's live studies of frozen rivers, which don't work as well when trying to represent a mighty polar iceberg-. However, it's incredible how he achived such uniformity with such a simple composition (causing a stir at the time), such amazing amount of detail, and a sense of action worthy of an NGS documentary
Also known as The Wreck of Hope and The Polar Sea, this landscape retells the fate of an English Arctic expedition- as imagined by Friedrich. Because, although an inscription on the ship reads HMS Griper, which was part of an English voyage to the North pole, the expedition was triumphant and none perished. In fact, the painting was originally called An Idealized Scene of an Arctic Sea, with a Wrecked Ship on the Heaped Masses of Ice. But although this scene is completely imaginary, it manages to convey the monumentality of nature and its vast, inmense power, capable of anihilating our own safe little world when we least expect it.
Curious. This picture could be a scene from the famous expedition to Antarctica commanded by Sir Ernest Shackleton, although this took place in 1915. The ship Endurance was trapped and later engulfed by the ice in a similar way to the one depicted in this masterpiece.
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