Gothic Cathedral Behind a Pond with Swans 1810 - 1815

Karl Friedrich Schinkel made this drawing, Gothic Cathedral Behind a Pond with Swans, using pen and brown ink with watercolor, sometime in the early 19th century. It depicts a Gothic cathedral, viewed through a frame, behind a body of water with swans. The image is highly evocative of the German Romantic movement, which emphasized emotion and individualism as well as the idealization of nature and the past. We could understand this artwork as a commentary on the relationship between nature and culture, and the ways in which this relationship was changing during the Industrial Revolution in Germany. To understand Schinkel’s motivations, we might turn to historical archives to investigate how architectural forms were understood at the time, the social and political functions of art, and the artist’s biography. Through such research we discover a rich and complex world of meaning, revealing this artwork as a product of its time.