Wanderlust From Caspar David Friedrich to Auguste Renoir

With Rousseau’s call to get “back to nature!” and Goethe’s Sturm und Drang poetry, wandering around 1800 became the expression of a modern awareness of life. As part of a reaction against the rapid social changes that began in the French Revolution, a new form of decelerated self- and world knowledge developed, whose presence can still be felt today.

The works shown in the exhibition, including masterworks by Friedrich, Schinkel, Dahl, Richard Wilson, Courbet, Kramskoi, Renoir, and more, show just how powerful and fruitful the motif of the wanderer was in art throughout the nineteenth century, not only in Germany but in many places, from France and Great Britain to Denmark, Norway and Russia.