For Friedrich, who was from Greifswald on the Baltic Sea, seascapes were of central importance. No other pictorial subject enabled him to depict the overcoming of the boundaries of natural space more convincingly. Broad sky and distant, removed horizons made it possible for the painter to experience the infinity of time and space.
As a metaphor for the journey of human life, ships regularly make their way across Friedrich’s seascapes; they depart the shore or return home. But Friedrich also depicted failure a number of times: sinking and shipwrecks. He gave one of his paintings, showing a beached wreck, to his brother Adolf. (1) In a letter from January 1, 1824, the painter, who was hoping for better times for himself and his brother, commented on the painting: “the storm purifies the air.” (2)
The large-format Seashore in Moonlight (3) shows a dark surface of the sea, calmed once again after a storm, with a sailboat run aground near the coast. White crests of waves can still be seen only at a great distance, on the horizon. Gray masses of clouds loom in the sky, half covering the moon, which stands high up in the center of the painting. Next to the capsized wreck lying on its side in shallow water, two seamen are sitting on rocks and have lit a fire, presumably hoping for aid. The mast of the ship, with a red flag at its peak, cuts through the horizon line beneath the moon. In the foreground, numerous black boulders are lying on the beach. The remnant of a boat that has washed up there – perhaps a rudder – can scarcely be seen. Behind, stones polished round by the water extend out to the boat looming out of the sea. When the painting was shown in an exhibition in Konigsberg in 1833 by its owner, the publisher and Friedrich collector Georg Andreas Reimer, a reviewer revealingly described the work as a “large black panel.“ (4)
For this composition, Friedrich went back to a drawing he had made on the beach of Sassnitz on Rügen in June 1826. (5) In the painting, he dispensed with several of the details in the foreground, such as two wooden rowboats, a ship’s mast, and several anchors. The earlier drawing was also the basis for his large composition – probably his last one in oil – Seashore in Moonlight (Hamburger Kunsthalle).
Birgit Verwiebe, in: exh. cat. Hamburg 2023, p. 226
(1) Rocky Shore with Beached Ship, before 1824, oil on canvas, 60 × 74 cm, formerly Galerie Koch, Hannover; Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, pp. 384 f., no. 307.
(2) Cited in ibid., p. 384.
(3) Ibid., p. 426, no. 392.
(4) Raabe 1833, p. 28, cited in Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, p. 120.
(5) Rocky Shore with Boats and Anchors, near Sassnitz, June 29, 1826, pencil, 12.6 × 20.5 cm, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo; Grummt 2011, vol. 2, pp. 816–18, no. 904.