View of the Ruined Castle in Rosemont 1861

This is Johan Barthold Jongkind's View of the Ruined Castle in Rosemont, made with graphite and watercolor on paper. Jongkind painted it in September 1886. Jongkind was a Dutch painter, who spent a lot of his time in France, associating with artists like Corot and Monet and is considered an important precursor to Impressionism. Here, Jongkind offers us a melancholic glimpse into the past. The ruined castle, rendered in muted tones, evokes a sense of loss and decay, perhaps mirroring Jongkind's own feelings of displacement as a Dutchman in France. The Romantic painters, like Caspar David Friedrich, also depicted ruins, viewing them as symbols of the transience of human achievements and the inevitable triumph of nature. But there is something more humble in Jongkind’s vision, less a grand statement, more a quiet meditation on time and change. Jongkind invites us to reflect on our own relationship to history and memory. Are we drawn to the grandeur of the past, or do we find beauty in its brokenness?