Tip: move over the painting to use the lens.

The Interior of the Palm House on the Pfaueninsel Near Potsdam

Artist: Carl Blechen (German, 1798–1840)
Date: 1834
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 135 × 126 cm (52 1/2 × 50 in.); Framed: 155 × 145.5 cm (61 × 57 1/4 in.)
Made in: Germany
Style: 19th century
Where to see it: Art Institute of Chicago

Through prior acquisitions of the George F. Harding Collection; L.L. and A.S. Coburn and Alexander A. McKay endowments; through prior gift of William Wood Prince; through prior acquisitions of the Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Endowment · CC0 Public Domain · Art Institute of Chicago · image via Wikimedia Commons · see it at the museum ↗

Notes from the museum

Lush palms and overgrown greenery dominate this view of the Palm House, designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel to display the Prussian royals’ collection of tropical plants. This painting plays with the boundaries between architecture and nature, imagination and reality: vines curl around soaring columns and bowed fronds evoke archways. Carl Blechen populated his dazzling place-portrait with a leisure scene derived from colonialist fantasies of non-European women. The artist dressed the ﬁgures in rich textiles that echo the building’s colors and motifs, as if he considered them an extension of the decor. The short career of Carl Blechen, a pivotal ﬁgure in nineteenth-century German painting, marked the transition from Romanticism to a more realistic view of nature. Inspired in part by his encounter with the Italian landscape and light during a trip he made around 1828 or 1829, Blechen developed a ﬂuid technique that enabled him to capture ﬂeeting atmospheric effects. He often used his landscapes as settings for mysterious ﬁgures, reﬂecting his early contact with Romantic painting and theater.

Text: Art Institute of Chicago (open access). Our full story for this work is coming soon.

Slow Look

The whole picture Let your eyes wander. Where do they want to rest?
The light Find the brightest spot. What is it showing you?
The edges Look at what is half cut off at the borders.
One small detail Choose one tiny thing and stay with it for a while.
The whole picture again Step back. Has it changed for you?

About Carl Blechen

Carl Eduard Ferdinand Blechen was a German landscape painter and a professor at the Academy of Arts, Berlin. His distinctive style was characteristic of the Romantic ideals of natural beauty.

Painter profile →