Through a window, brightly. That’s what you’ll find at “Rooms With a View,” a rare and Romantic show opening tomorrow at the Met.
Romantic, because these 60-odd paintings and drawings were made in the 19th century, the so-called Romantic era, during and after the chaos and deprivations of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15). Northern European artists looked out of their barren rooms and saw light, life and promise streaming through their windows.
Rare, too, because, in our own chaotic, hard-pressed times — when museums scour their attics for old works they can exhibit under new titles — nearly everything here is on loan from Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, France and Italy.
Many are considered national treasures and have never before left their native countries, so it’s no wonder we haven’t seen them before.
“When the conservator arrived from [the Goethe Museum in]
Weimar, he was still trembling,” Met curator Sabine Rewald says of the delivery of four Georg Friedrich Kersting paintings. “He wasn’t sure they’d survive the trip!”
Not only did the Kerstings survive, but they’re lovely: quiet scenes of women sewing or simply standing by a window, lost in thought, dressed like characters out of a Jane Austen novel.
In some canvases — later works by Friedrich Wasmann, Franz Ludwig Catel and Carl Gustav Carus (that last, a professor of gynecology as well as a painter) — there are no figures at all, just windows and views: a leafy branch wavering high above a Roman villa; a sailboat gliding through the Bay of Naples; a studio bathed in moonlight.
The pictures themselves are relatively small; they were painted for people’s parlors, not big museum shows. But the details are delicious.
Check out Johann Erdman Hummel’s “Sitting Room,” in which a dog grins at his own reflection, and the badly rumpled bed in Adolf Menzel’s “The Artist’s Bedroom in Ritterstrasse.”
Set in the Berlin apartment the artist shared with his brother and sister, the room boasts a pretty view of the city square, but it’s hard to stop looking at that bed.
“People have asked me if there’s a dead body in it,” Rewald says, but as far as she knows, it’s just a messy bed.
And then there’s “Interior With Young Woman Tracing a Flower.” In this painting by Louise-Adeone Drolling, daughter of French artist Martin Drolling, whose work is also displayed here, a pet squirrel sits on the arm of a chair. Nibbling a nut, he’s a study in concentration — which is more than can be said for the girl watching him.
A crumpled piece of paper lies on the floor, in the foreground. Rewald, who examined the paper through a magnifying glass, says it’s an early, abandoned sketch of a tulip.
There are plenty of windows to peek through, and you’ll probably want to linger at each. Spring for an audio guide, and let Rewald reward you with even more details.
“Rooms With a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century,” tomorrow through July 4 at the Met, Fifth Avenue at 81st Street; metmuseum.org.
