Aussicht von Schloß Montclair 1852

Curator: So, here we have Peter Becker’s “Aussicht von Schloss Montclair,” a pencil drawing created in 1852, currently residing here at the Städel Museum. Editor: My first impression is just... serenity. There’s this quiet beauty to the scene, a gentle vastness captured with such delicate lines. It feels like a memory, soft and slightly faded. Curator: Yes, "faded" is an interesting word choice, especially if we place the piece within the historical context of Romanticism. It yearns, perhaps, for a return to an idealized past, but there's also the looming anxiety related to German nationalism brewing at this moment in history. Does the seeming “emptiness” feel melancholic, or…desolate? Editor: Desolate maybe edges a little too harsh. More like… contemplative. It makes me think about how landscapes were often used in the 19th century as representations of national identity, though not always deliberately, and also as expressions of individual emotion. And this vista from Montclair does feel deeply personal, but is it speaking for a nation? I feel Becker's interior life in those pencil strokes. Curator: It's true, the personal and political are rarely separate. And it is primarily a drawing made with a medium associated with study rather than finished art. But I also see echoes of earlier Romantic painters like Caspar David Friedrich. Becker situates the viewer within, and apart, simultaneously from the sublimity of the natural world, albeit on a modest scale and tonal register. But in rendering nature with what looks like photographic fidelity—perhaps for later transcription into an engraving—Becker stakes a claim on seeing the landscape as it is. Editor: A claim, perhaps even an insistence. He is demanding a certain kind of vision, a romantic one to be sure. I feel invited to enter the artist's quiet inner world where there is intimacy instead of the bombast associated with sublime encounters. I appreciate this opportunity to be invited to witness and reflect, as an outsider and maybe as an accomplice, a relationship of shared interiority in the quiet hills. Curator: Well, regardless, "Aussicht von Schloss Montclair" offers us a fascinating snapshot into the artistic and social sensibilities of its time. A world, viewed through the eye and the hand of an artist trying to grasp his place in it, one line at a time. Editor: It certainly provokes a dialogue with nature, identity, and art itself. Becker’s understated rendering evokes, for me, a reminder of nature’s constant state of flux, mirroring human emotions.