art-history:

Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1809-10. Oil on canvas, 110 x 172 cm. Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Friedrich’s early Monk by the Sea reflects the almost religious awe of nature that marks Kosegarten’s writings. Striking in its stark simplicity, this painting represents a coastal scene—beach, sea, sky—populated only by the minute figure of a Capuchin. We are invited to imagine the monk’s emotions as he looks out over the dark surface of the sea towards the distant horizon, where the water meets the vast expanse of the sky. Radical in its conception, Friedrich’s painting was a success with his contemporaries, who realized its novelty. The German poet Heinrich von Kleist felt that the painter had “blazed an entirely new trail in the field of his art” and spoke of Friedrich’s “Kosegartian effect.” (Source: Nineteenth-Century European Art)