Views From the Met

A couple days ago, I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There were many new exhibitions going on and the one that I found most interesting was entitled Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century. The exhibition was a series of paintings that illustrated various rooms—some with people, some without, but always with a window looking outside. Now that I’ve been reading about symbolism in art, and looking at the intention of the artist, I wanted to figure out why this artist chose to put windows in each painting. Looking at the paintings, they were obviously done by an artist with great skill and ability—they paintings are truly beautiful and their use of light is exceptional. But the windows spoke to me. Something about them made me want to dig a little deeper. So I took a while to think. I sat down on the couches the museum had in the center of the gallery and looked around at all the paintings.

Woman Embroidering, Georg Friedrich Kersting

Woman at the Window, Caspar David Friedrich

View of Pillnitz Castle, Johan Christian Dahl

 View from the Artist’s Window, Martinus Rorbye

 

Interior with View of Sainte-Eustache, Martin Drolling

Each painting has a window. In each window there is a view. But inside the room there is nothing out of the ordinary going on. In fact, the lives of the figures in the paintings, or if they don’t have figures then just the rooms themselves, appear very mundane. Boring, almost. So what do these windows say? Perhaps they’re there to say something. Perhaps the windows are there to symbolize what could be, what the people in the paintings are missing in their lives. What’s going on inside of the room has no real life to it. The people are certainly performing tasks, but there is no true story in any of the paintings. And to me, it seems as though the windows serve to show that if they leave their rooms, if the people in these paintings make a change in how they live, they can improve the quality of their lives.

This was the description the Met gave of the exhibition:

This exhibition focuses on a subject treasured by the Romantics: the view through an open window. German, French, Danish, and Russian artists first took up the theme in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Juxtaposing near and far, the window is a metaphor for unfulfilled longing. Painters distilled this feeling in pictures of hushed, spare rooms with contemplative figures; studios with artists at work; and open windows as the sole motif. As the exhibition reveals, these pictures may shift markedly in tone, yet they share a distinct absence of the anecdote and narrative that characterized earlier genre painting.