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The artist Carl Gustav Carus left a description of the atmosphere of this painting – one which could hardly be bettered. In his memoirs, he imagined himself back at this beach on the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea...

“… where the east wind forcefully drove the waves onto the land, the tempestuous surf surging in tall and brown, the waves covering each other in foam, constantly giving birth to new ones which break on the sandy shore. I intended to make studies, but hardly had I sketched a few lines than I flung my portfolio of drawing paper away, convinced that here each line is just a sacrilege in the face of this boundless, inexhaustible phenomenon, and so I only stared intently at this wonderful battle of the elements.”

In his professional life, Carus was a physician – but medicine alone was not enough. He also wanted to express other sides of his personality. While still at school, he had taken drawing lessons. In Dresden in 1817, he met Caspar David Friedrich, an artist he venerated, and they became lifelong friends. Not only did they discuss art, but Friedrich was a mentor for Carus in his painting. This painting dates from 1819 after Carus, following in Friedrich’s footsteps, visited the island of Rügen off the north German coast. There, he hoped to “engage more profoundly with the specific nature of northern German Romanticism”. Carus was fascinated by the sea, its surging and swirling tides, its infinite expanse, its inexpressible sublimity, the line of its horizon. He made numerous sketches and drawings which served as models for paintings after he returned from Rügen.

In this work, our attention is drawn immediately to the rise and fall of the billowing waves; the chalk cliffs, sailing boats and gulls only play a secondary role. It seems as if Carus, as an artist, surrendered totally to the experience of the force of nature, while as a scientist he studied and analysed the breaking waves intently so he could recreate them in their various and diverse forms.