Landscape with moon

A studio watercolour with a visible pencil sketch presents a dune landscape, lit with cold moonlight, with fragments of dried up tree trunks in the foreground and a small bush in the background. The piece that dates back to the early period of Blechen's work results from direct observation of the Baltic landscape. It reveals the artist’s deep sensitivity to nature. Using limited artistic resources, he renders the elusive, Romantic atmosphere. The artist created an excellent nocturne using several soft lines and spots of watercolour paint, limiting the colours to dark, dirty blue and brownish grey, additionally using the whiteness of the primer. A significant part of the composition is taken up by the evening overcast sky with the moon shining from behind the clouds. Such studies of clouds appear in the works of Blechen primarily in the 1820s and in the first half of the 1830s. In the context of the mode of preparation of the clouds, it is worth noting analogies with the oil study “Grey Overcast Sky with the Moon” from approx. 1823 (Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz). Before travelling to Rome in the summer of 1828, the painter ˗ together with Johan Christian Claus Dahl ˗ made a short study trip across Pomerania and visited Stralsund, the isle of Rugia, as well as Świnoujście and Szczecin (one of the drawings from that time, “Sailing Boats in the Harbour”, probably presents the Szczecin harbour, today in the collection of Pommersches Landesmuseum, Greifswald). The watercolour composition bears similarities with a series of 21 known drawings and watercolour paintings connected with the artist's stay at the Baltic coast. These works, nowadays kept in various museum collections, have similar dimensions and just like the Szczecin painting have not been dated or signed.

Dariusz Kacprzak