DESCRIBING A

PICTURE:
LANDSCAPE
ENGLISH IV
Lorenzo Abdias Vasquez Yparraguirre
 Seascape

The Sea of Ice (German: Das Eismeer)

(1823–1824) is an oil painting showing a
shipwreck in the Arctic by the German Romantic
painter Caspar David Friedrich. This painting
was known as The Polar Sea before 1826.
Das Eismeer
The Sea of Ice (German: Das Eismeer)
ABOUT THE PICTURE
The work was first exhibited at the Prague
Academy exhibition in 1824 with the title An
Idealized Scene of an Arctic Sea, with a
Wrecked Ship on the Heaped Masses of Ice.
Considered one of Friedrich's masterpieces,
the radical composition and subject matter
were unusual for their time and the work was
met with incomprehension. The painting was
still unsold when Friedrich died in 1840. It is
currently held by the Kunsthalle Hamburg,
Germany.
The Romantic movement emerged at the end
of the eighteenth century. Romanticism was
both an artistic movement and an approach
to life. It rejected the Enlightenment ideas of
rationalism and intellect in favor of religion,
emotion, and culture. A major theme in
Romanticism is the focus on nature as the
subject.
In the 19th century many Germans were
interested in the Arctic including Friedrich. In
German Romanticism the North was seen as a
positive thing while the classic south was a
negative thing.
DESCRIPTION OF THE PICTURE
The Sea of Ice was composed in one of
Friedrich's studios near Dresden. This painting
is clearly based on the Arctic, though Friedrich
had never visited the Arctic. It has been
suggested that Friedrich gained his
knowledge about the Arctic from the William
Edward Parry's expedition.
But because there were multiple reports and
articles about the Arctic in Germany it has
never been confirmed that Friedrich used
Parry's expedition to paint The Sea of Ice.
Friedrich also gained knowledge about
icebergs through studying them on the Elbe.
The Sea of Ice represents what Friedrich
believes the Arctic looks like.
In the foreground of the painting there are
small icebergs layered on top of each other,
which makes them almost look like steps. In
the background, however, the icebergs are
crushed together to form a tower of ice.
These icebergs are very large and suggest
something terrible has happened.
Right next to this massive ice tower is a
minuscule detail that is not the subject of the
painting. It is a shipwreck.
DESCRIBING A PICTURE
This scene takes place in the Arctic. It’s in The painting is in sharp focus. It conveys the
summer. The weather is bad. It is sunny. impression of a chaotic and failure expedition.
There no people. Just a shipwreck.
In my opinion, I think that it is a rescue day
because the author has used warm colours to
In the background, you can see some ice express hope.
mountains, some clouds, a blue sky. There is
a empty ice desert.
The central figure is an iceberg.It looks like a
lots of ice sheets.
VASYPA
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