In conjunction with The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fine exhibition, Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, we are pleased to highlight a work that resonates with Friedrich’s contemplative landscapes: Die Insel (The Island), 1923, by Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956). Feininger’s prismatic seascape, defined by bold horizontal planes, features a slender shoreline yielding to calm seas. A gray-brown, tanker-shaped cloud formation, framed by luminous turquoise skies, hovers above the shoreline. A lone figure, dressed in black, stands in the foreground, dwarfed by the vast, still space surrounding him.

Die Insel recalls Friedrich’s painting Der Mönch am Meer (Monk by the Sea), 1808–10, among the works on view at The Met. One of the artist’s most enigmatic and iconic works, it depicts a solitary monk beholding the sea and sky from his vantage point on a cliff. His dark robe blends into the tones of the whitecapped water, and he barely registers in the vastness of the painting’s pictorial space, dominated by a darkening, cloudy sky.

In fact, Feininger was unaware of Friedrich’s work when he began exploring his own seascape compositions in the early 1920s. As he later attested: “Paintings of C.D. Friedrich I only saw long after I had painted those pictures…which brought about my reputation of having been influenced by him.” It seems, then, that the two artists shared a reverence for nature and were responding similarly to their experiences along Germany’s Baltic coast, more than a century apart. Both spent summers in the region, deeply inspired by its maritime culture and coastal landscapes.

Friedrich likely based Der Mönch am Meer on a view from the island of Rügen, while Feininger’s Die Insel was inspired by a 1922 stay at Walter Gropius’s summer home in Timmendorfer Strand. Both artists worked from sketches and memories, completing their paintings after returning from their seaside holidays, Friedrich to Dresden and Feininger to Weimar, where he was a master at the Bauhaus. Reflecting on these “pictures of the Pomeranian shore,” art historian Hans Hess observed that “Friedrich paints an allegory, Feininger a state of mind. Feininger’s sky is as eternal as Friedrich’s; both artists see a mystery, but Friedrich sees the mystery of creation, Feininger the mystery of existence.”

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