Around 1818, Friedrich painted two works showing a woman at the seashore. One of these two paintings is known only from photographs; it was in Gotha at the time and was destroyed in the Munich Glaspalast fire in 1931. (1) It offered a motif that was unusually anecdotal for Friedrich: a woman sitting on a rock visibly waving a handkerchief at a ship in the distance. The second painting, of identical format, seems more unconventional. (2) For here a woman is seen from behind in an almost reclining pose, so that she seems clearly calmer and more relaxed, while five boats in an orderly row are gliding past her. As natural as the woman’s posture may seem, the painting’s composition is very calculated: the fishing nets spread out on horizontal lines across the water are responded to by the horizontal strip of the chalk cliffs of Arkona, and the hulls of the boats form a diagonal that is repeated by the shoreline. These diagonal lines find their complementary counterpoint in a line that rises from left to right marked by the tips of the masts.

The position of a woman lying propped up in nature remains unusual. Although it is distantly reminiscent of Joseph Wright of Derby’s Portrait of Sir Brooke Boothby (1781) and Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein’s Goethe in the Roman Campagna (1787), it is highly unlikely that Friedrich knew either of these paintings. Nevertheless, a portrait of the Duchesse de Chartres, Louise Marie Adelaide de Bourbon, presented in the Salon of Paris by the French painter Joseph Siffred Duplessis in 1779 was widely disseminated in a reproductive engraving by Benoit Louis Henriquez. It shows the Duchess of Chartres in a largely reclining pose on a bank, but she is turned away from the departing ship and toward the viewer.

The comparison with the French portrait further emphasizes how removed from us the woman in Friedrich’s painting is. Not only must her identity remain unexplained but the target of her gaze is also uncertain. The orientation of her head parallel to the picture plane leads us to suspect that her attention is not on the boats to which our eyes are drawn.

Johannes Grave, in: exh. cat. Hamburg 2023, p. 206.

(1) Börsch-Supan/Jahnig 1973, pp. 346 f., no. 244.
(2) For this painting, see Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, p. 347, no. 245; coll. cat. Winterthur 1993, pp. 75 f., no. 29; Busch 2003, p. 126; Börsch-Supan 2008, pp. 139 f.; exh. cat. Oslo/Dresden 2014, p. 167, no. 58; Busch 2021, pp. 71 f.