Woman at a Window is an 1822 oil painting by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. This painting is currently located in Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. The painting depicts an interior with a woman, seen from behind, peering out an opened window. Beyond the window, the masts of ships are visible. The woman in the piece is Friedrich's wife Caroline and the view from the window is from his studio overlooking the Elbe river in Dresden. Friedrich submitted his work to be exhibited at the Dresden Academy, however he did not complete the piece in time to be in the main exhibition.
This painting employs the motif of the Rückenfigur, or a figure seen from behind, which is commonly associated with Friedrich who notoriously made use of this compositional device in many of his pieces. The Rückenfigur serves as a surrogate for the viewer to experience what they are witnessing. In this painting, the viewer is invited to look beyond the interior into the external world, as the woman does, experiencing her sense of yearning.
Artist and model
Caspar David Friedrich was born in a harbor town known as Greifswald in Pomerania in 1774, many years before Germany's cities and states were unified. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Germany remained economically and politically weak but grew in the intellectual and spiritual sense. The emergence of Romanticism fostered a shift from the material world to the natural world evident in the German Romantic movement spanning Friedrich's lifetime. Primarily working in Dresden, Friedrich established his spiritual artistic style, creating landscapes that "looked inwards as well as outwards."
Also in Dresden, Friedrich met his wife Caroline Bommer, whom he married in 1818. Friedrich paints his wife Caroline in Woman at a Window, four years after their marriage, in their Dresden apartment overlooking the Elbe. Caroline appears as a figure in numerous works by Friedrich, such as Sisters, The Chalk Cliff on Rügen and On the Sailing Boat. Friedrich's artwork had long included figures, but after his marriage it placed a new emphasis on domesticity.
Influences
During the year 1816, Friedrich experienced what he described as a "crisis" in his artistic style, with his primary focus being on seascapes, which lacked vibrancy and formality. In the subsequent years, Friedrich's style was heavily influenced by changes in his social life, including his marriage to Caroline Bommer in 1818, after which he placed new emphasis on figures in his artwork. Friedrich's work at the time may also have been influenced by the younger artists that he became acquainted with in Dresden, including Georg Friedrich Kersting, Carl Gustav Carus, and Johan Christian Dahl. In particular, Dahl had a significant influence on Friedrich's work; the two artists were closely connected, sharing a house together in Dresden. During the time of their friendship, Friedrich's focus on landscapes and use of vibrant colors and looser brushstrokes were notable.
Prior to his execution of Woman at a Window, Friedrich created a sepia sketch of his view from the window of his Dresden studio. Beginning with his sketch View from the Artist's Atelier in 1806, Friedrich established his craft at portraying a view through an opened window, through which he represents the juxtaposition "between interior and exterior as a play between self and world, consciousness and nature." Friedrich's refined use of the window motif serves to represent both the artist's viewpoint and the view from the window itself.