Monk by the Sea, Caspar David Friedrich (1808)
Friedrich worked for two years on this, ultimately his most famous work. The composition is divided horizontally into land, sea, and sky with a clear simplicity that shocked his contemporaries. A monk stands, bareheaded, on the shore. Seagulls circle around him. The lonely figure faces the leaden blackness of the immeasurably vast sea. The grey band of cloud over the water surprisingly gives way to blue sky along the top edge of the picture. No artistic composition had ever been as uncompromising as this: the main space of the picture seems like an abyss of some kind; there are no boundaries, there is nothing to hold on to, just a sense of floating between night and day, between despair and hope.
