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The third room looks at Friedrich’s use of colour – and in his oeuvre, colour played an outstanding role.

His famous Large Enclosure painting is a prime example of just how brilliantly he used colour. Take a moment to look at the subtle transitions in the colour of the sunset!

Here too you can find the influence of an Old Master painter. In his day, baroque artist Claude Lorrain was acknowledged as the gold standard of sunsets – for instance, in the painting further to the right which Friedrich could study in the Dresden collection.

Certainly, the overpowering impression of Friedrich’s Large Enclosure has much to do with his play of colours. Back then, most artists saw colour largely as a means to reproduce their subjects mimetically, as true to life as possible. But in Friedrich’s works colour plays a far more important role, almost becoming a protagonist itself – an exceptionally modern approach at that time. You could even go so far as to say Friedrich already points to the colour field paintings of such artists as Yves Klein or Mark Rothko over 100 years later when colour becomes the sole main actor.

But it is not only the colours of the Large Enclosure that stand out. Although Friedrich painted a real landscape of water meadows along the River Elbe, why does the Earth’s surface seem to curve upwards? This distortion may well come from Friedrich working with a camera obscura or camera lucida. In different ways, both devices could project a subject directly onto the paper, making it easier to draw. However, this creates distortions at the edge of the picture – and in this case, Friedrich deliberately included them.