Carl Gustav Carus, '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 scratchings 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.

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.