Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the Nineteenth Century

Rewald, Sabine (2011)

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New York Book Festival Award in Photography/Art, Honorable Mention (2011)

Read an interview with Sabine Rewald at Now at the Met.

Publication Details

Description

"Everything at a distance turns into poetry: distant mountains, distant people, distant events: all becomes Romantic." With these words, the German poet Novalis anticipated the appeal of one of the richest motifs in the visual arts: the open window. Beginning with two sepia drawings by Caspar David Friedrich, images of windows—with or without human figures, starkly bare or draped with billowing fabric—filled up artists' sketchbooks and portfolios and resonated through the art academies and annual exhibitions of Germany, Denmark, France, Russia, and the other northern countries.

In contrast to examples from earlier centuries, such as the celebrated works of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, the early nineteenth-century pictures usually show the windows straight on, with views seen through them—pastoral and alpine views, views of sea and sky or moon and clouds, and urban views of rooftops, steeples, shipyards, or the skyline of Rome, where so many northern artists went to complete their studies, Sabine Rewald's informative and perceptive texts set these works in the context of their creators' lives and careers, apartments and studios, families and professional circles. Following the motif from Friedrich's sepias in the early 1800s through the flowering of Romanticism to the mid-century emergence of Realism in the works of Adolph Menzel, Rewald provides a much-needed perspective on this important period in Europe even as the works themselves, gathered together here for the first time, offer pure visual pleasure.

Table of contents

Contents
Directors Foreword
Acknowledgments
Lenders to the Exhibition

Reflections on the Open Window

Catalogue

Paintings

Drawings and Watercolors

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Photograph Credits

About the authors

Sabine Rewald is Jacques and Natasha Gelman Curator in the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Press reviews

The New Republic

"Rewald is right on target."

The New York Times Literary Supplement

"Sometimes small books make the most lasting impression. I found that to be true about Sabine Rewald's Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century ... Rewald always makes something resonant of all the images, in prose which has its own modest poetry."

The New York Review

"first-rate"

London Review of Books

"In these pictures you see what they see—views suitable to feelings described in Romantic poetry."

Press release

Featured Catalogue: Rooms with a View

Posted on April 26, 2011

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Exhibition

Rooms With a View: The Open Window in the Nineteenth Century

Everything at a distance turns into poetry: distant mountains, distant people, distant events: all become Romantic. (Novalis, 1798)

This exhibition focuses on a subject treasured by the Romantics: the view through an open window. German, French, Danish, and Russian artists first took up the theme in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Juxtaposing near and far, the window is a metaphor for unfulfilled longing. Painters distilled this feeling in pictures of hushed, spare rooms with contemplative figures; studios with artists at work; and open windows as the sole motif. As the exhibition reveals, these pictures may shift markedly in tone, yet they share a distinct absence of the anecdote and narrative that characterized earlier genre painting.

Presented in four galleries, Rooms with a View features the works of about forty artists, most from Northern Europe. The first exhibition of its kind, it ranges from the initial appearance of the motif in two sepia drawings of about 18057ndash;6 by Caspar David Friedrich to paintings featuring luminous empty rooms of the late 1840s by Adolph Menzel. Many of the artists are little known on these shores, their works unseen until now.

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