Chalk Cliffs on Rugen

Three figures cluster at the brink of dazzling white chalk cliffs that frame a dizzying drop to the blue sea far below, the jagged rocks and slender trees enclosing the vertiginous view. Caspar David Friedrich, painting around the time of his marriage, balances the thrill of the precipice with quiet contemplation, the tiny humans set against the grandeur of the coast. Now in Winterthur, Chalk Cliffs on Rugen turns a real Baltic landscape into a Romantic meditation on nature's beauty and danger, the eye pulled both outward to the horizon and down into the abyss.