Freedom and captivity - first painting by German Romantic artist Carl Gustav Carus to enter a UK public collection

The National Gallery has acquired A View of the Sky from a Prison Window (1823) by Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869) – the first painting by the 19th-century German Romantic painter to enter a UK public collection.

The picture, on display in Room 38, is one of the new Bicentenary acquisitions announced to coincide with the opening of CC Land: The Wonder of Art, the biggest ever rehang of the National Gallery’s collection, and of the newly transformed Sainsbury Wing on 10 May 2025.

Bought for £396,660, thanks to a generous legacy from Mrs Martha Doris Bailey and Mr Richard Hillman Bailey, and with the support of Mr and Mrs Booth-Clibborn and others, the acquisition, which powerfully evokes ideas of freedom and captivity, honours the close-on three decades of curatorial activity at the National Gallery of Christopher Riopelle, the Neil Westreich Curator of Post 1800 Paintings.

One of the key figures of German Romanticism Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869) was a German physiologist and painter, born in Leipzig. A friend of the writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) he was a doctor, naturalist, scientist, psychologist and landscape painter who studied with the great German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840).

This small, arresting work was painted in Dresden at the height of Carus’s friendship with Friedrich. The view looks out through a barred window onto a blue sky streaked with wisps of white cloud, with no features of town of country visible. On the grey stone windowsill a few stalks of straw are scattered. To the right the first few links of a heavy chain are set in the wall. The artist has portrayed a spider’s web just beyond the bars, its delicate threads stretching from top to bottom.

Every damage and crack are rendered, from the deep fissures caused by the bars themselves to chips along the front of the ledge. Yet for all the detail, the work is thinly painted with the pale ground showing through throughout. The artist’s signature incised into the stone perhaps evokes the scratched marks made by prisoners onto the walls of their cells. And this sense of imprisonment is echoed in the web beyond, a symbol of life or a trap waiting on the other side.

The painting will enhance the Gallery’s growing collection of German 19th-century art which also includes pictures by Friedrich and Adolph Menzel (1815‒1905).

Sarah Herring, Associate Curator of Post-1800 Paintings, says: ‘Carus is possibly remembering his own views of the barred windows of church ruins. Such a subject also reflects recent events of the Napoleonic Wars, Dresden itself being the site of Napoleon’s last major victory in August 1813. It is perhaps even a reference to Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, performed in Dresden in 1823, which recounted the story of the rescue of a political prisoner from prison. More universally, the window here is not the means through which to observe and depict a view of the outside world, instead it functions as a boundary between interior and exterior, dark and light, imprisonment and liberty. Ultimately the picture addresses the dialogue between fear and hope, captivity and freedom, both physical and psychological.’

Sir Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery, says: ‘I am grateful for the legacies of Mrs Martha Doris Bailey and Mr Richard Hillman Bailey, and for the support of Mr and Mrs Booth-Clibborn and others, that have enabled us to acquire this powerful painting symbolising Romantic-era preoccupations with liberty and captivity. It is the first painting by Carus to enter a UK collection and will enhance our growing 19th-century German collection alongside such painters as Friedrich and Menzel.’

A View of the Sky from a Prison Window is one of a group of new acquisitions announced as part of the opening of the new 'CC Land: The Wonder of Art'. The others are Ballet Dancers by Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas (1888) and A Banquet Still Life by Carl Gustav Carus (1823).

These follow recent announcements of other acquisitions for the Gallery’s Bicentenary - King David by Guercino, the early 16th-century Netherlandish or French altarpiece The Virgin and Child with Saints Louis and Margaret and the new commission for the Gallery’s Contextual Collection Mud Sun by Sir Richard Long. 

These works are all on now on display together with those NG200 acquisitions announced last year - Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s After the Audience, Poussin’s Eucharist and Eva Gonzales’s The Full-length Mirror. 

Notes to editors

NG6704: Carl Gustav Carus 
'A View of the Sky from a Prison Window', 1823
Oil on canvas
H 28.4 × W 21.4 cm  
Bought thanks to a generous legacy from Mrs Martha Doris Bailey and Mr Richard Hillman Bailey, and with the support of Mr and Mrs Booth-Clibborn and others, in honour of curator Christopher Riopelle, 2025

The picture, on display in Room 38, was purchased for £396,660.38.

The acquisition of the Carus picture honours Christopher Riopelle’s 27 years as Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, which he joined in 1997. During this time he has been responsible for a series of ground-breaking exhibitions which have gone far beyond the confines of the collection, including 'Russian Landscapes in the Age of Tolstoy' (2004), 'Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters', 1891‒1910 (2008), Australia’s Impressionists (2016‒17) and Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light (2019), the last leading directly to the first Joaquín Sorolla, The Drunkard, Zarauz (El Borracho, Zaraus) (1910) being acquired for the Gallery.

He has been an advocate for enriching the collection with paintings by Gallen Kallela, the first Finnish artist to be represented, the Belgian Théo van Rysselberghe, the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler, and the Norwegian Peder Balke. Among the other German paintings that he has been responsible for acquiring are Adolph Menzel’s Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens (1867) purchased in 2006, and most recently Max Pechstein’s Portrait of Charlotte Cuhrt (1910), purchased in 2022.

About the painting - 'A View of the Sky from a Prison Window', 1823

This small, arresting work was painted at the height of Carus’s friendship with Friedrich. The view looks out through a barred window onto a blue sky streaked with wisps of white cloud, with no features of town of country visible. On the grey stone windowsill a few stalks of straw are scattered. To the right the first few links of a heavy chain are set in the wall. The artist has portrayed a spider’s web just beyond the bars, its delicate threads stretching from top to bottom. Every damage and crack are rendered, from the deep fissures caused by the bars themselves to chips along the front of the ledge. Yet for all the detail, the work is thinly painted with the pale ground showing through throughout.

Images of views from windows onto townscapes or landscapes has a long tradition, notably in religious works of the Northern Renaissance. During the Romantic era Friedrich established such images as subjects in their own right, the window depicted as a gateway to the world beyond, often combined with a contemplative figure seen from the back. But here Carus was not aiming to paint the scene through the window, but the window itself, its frame and bars. And it is no studio or domestic window. The patch of sky seen from behind bars, the thick wall, the chain and the blades of straw, perhaps from the floor or escaped from bedding all evoke a prison cell. The artist’s signature incised into the stone perhaps evokes the scratched marks made by prisoners onto the walls of their cells. And this sense of imprisonment is echoed in the web beyond, a symbol of life or a trap waiting on the other side.

About the artist - Carl Gustav Carus, 1789–1869

A seminal figure in German Romanticism, Carl Gustav Carus was a physician, philosopher, natural scientist and painter.  While undertaking his medical training in Leipzig, he also took drawing lessons and taught himself painting. In 1814 Carus moved to Dresden to take up the professorship of gynaecology at the Royal Academy of Surgery and Medicine, together with the directorship of the maternity hospital. In 1817 he met Caspar David Friedrich, with whom he formed a close friendship. Friedrich gave him advice in oil painting technique and also influenced Carus’s early subject matter of church ruins, evening and winter landscapes which were imbued with religious mysticism. His later works, painted with greater naturalism and scientific observation, reflected his growing belief in the importance for the landscape painter of knowledge of such disciplines as geology. His Nine Letters on Landscape Painting, written from 1815‒24, and published in 1831 with an introduction by the writer Goethe, reflects this development in his approach.

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Image caption

Carl Gustav Carus 
'A View of the Sky from a Prison Window', 1823
© The National Gallery, London

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