Chalk Cliffs on Rügen

1818

Oil on canvas, about 90 × 70 cm. Kunst Museum Winterthur, Reinhart am Stadtgarten, Winterthur

Three figures on a grassy clifftop, framed by leaning trees, look over white pinnacles and a calm sea. The museum counts it among the painter's most radical compositions, and among his most colorful and festive.

He and Caroline Bommer married that year; the picture followed their wedding journey, which his brother joined.
Look at the figures: the woman points downward, one man crawls to peer over the edge, and the other stands gazing out to sea.
Depth is almost abandoned. The museum reads the flat zones as life (green ground), death (white cliffs) and the infinite (sea fading into sky).
A private story may sit inside the landscape: the museum suggests the figures could be those three travelers, which would make the view a personal record.
Purchased in 1930; now in the Oskar Reinhart Foundation, whose collection the Winterthur museum shows.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain (PD-Art)