The Chasseur in the Woods (1814)
The Chasseur in the Woods (1814)
657 × 467 mm oil on canvas
With Napoleon being in the news at present. (200 years since his death on St. Helena) it seems appropriate for me to choose this multifaceted painting by Caspar David Friedrich as my painting of the week. As we shall see there is a political interpretation and an existentialism meaning as well as, of course, an art historical interpretation. As always, I recommend looking at a copy of this mage on the internet – a suggestion is given in the notes at the end of the article.
The composition takes the familiar Friedrich arrangement with an inverted V of the grass in the foreground which has been rendered yellowy-white by a recent slight snowfall and a slightly shallower inverted V formed by the sky at the top of the picture.[i]
In the centre there is a strong vertical stress produced by the fir trees and the lone figure of the French soldier who is placed at the centre of this symmetrical composition. This vertical symmetry is emphasised not only by the two V formations but also by the identically snow covered Christmas trees placed on the right and left of the foreground. Tremendous depth is given to this painting by the linear perspective achieved by the arrangement of the tall fir trees leading the eye through a tunnel to total black obscurity in the distance towards which the horseless Chasseur is looking. A significant difference between this and many of the Rückenfigur (back view – a characteristic of many of Friedrich’s images) paintings is that the eye is actually led through the picture rather than given pause for thought at a chasm. In the foreground there are two tree stumps and a black bird the significance of which will be examined shortly.
There are two main interpretations of this work. First there is a visual essay in existentialism, the lone stationary figure contemplating his future – whether to return along the path already taken back to a land which is no longer what it was or to continue forward into a life perhaps of utter darkness. Friedrich would have been very familiar with the Psalms and one of the Psalms of Lamentation could well be appropriate here, for example in Psalm 25 we have the poet having suffered at the hand of his enemies saying ‘for I am alone and in misery…O keep my soul and deliver me.’[ii] This painting represents the epitome of the pain of loneliness. In his interpretation, Koerner sees himself standing in place of the chasseur and seeking to stand where the turned traveller pauses, I will feel looked at from behind … Autoscopy is somehow always implied by such turned travellers in Friedrich’s paintings, for in their faceless anonymity they mirror our act of looking in an uncanny way. During the experience of autoscopy, we read, [quoting Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1908-1961] the subject is overcome by a feeling of profound sadness which spreads outwards and into the very image of the double … Friedrich’s paintings are strangely sadder and lonelier when they are inhabited by a turned figure than when they are empty. Who is this sole self who halts before wandering into the painted world, and who, as Friedrich’s contemporaries interpreted Chasseur, hears his deathsong sung by the raven sitting in the margin that separates him from ourselves?[iii] (Autoscopy – hallucination of an image of one’s body.)
This painting represents a route to the Transcendent; as well as the viewer straining to see beyond the veil (by staring into the utter darkness of the forest) he or she is almost entering into the mind of the traveller, in this case the chasseur, and sharing his existential angst. The chasseur has lost his horse, emphasising defeat and has been placed by Friedrich, alone in a foreign forest awaiting his end and the final judgement.
Friedrich invites us to empathise with that cavalry man as he awaits his fate – death from hypothermia and starvation or, possibly, capture by an hostile indigenous population.
Secondly there is the political interpretation – the Napoleonic retreat from Moscow had taken place two years before and at this time France had had to give way to Germany. (The painting was produced in the early Autumn of 1814, when the defeat of the French in March of that year would have been uppermost in the thought of Friedrich.) The two tree stumps could represent the defeated France. Regarding the black bird, Hofmann quotes an article in the newspaper Vossische Zeitung: ‘A French Chasseur walks alone through the forest of snow-covered fir trees, and a raven on a tree trunk sings him his death song’.[iv] Whether or not the black bird is a raven is open to question, but if one regards this painting as concerned with the death of France then the raven with its, admittedly disputed, symbolism of representing a black hole of the universe or death, would seem to be an obvious choice.
Unlike some of the other Rückenfigur paintings we are rather more restricted in seeing the viewpoint of the wanderer figure; by his having been placed further into the picture we cannot be absolutely sure of that which he is seeing. Can he see something down the dark pathway into the forest which we cannot see? Is he contemplating whether or not to take the higher or lower path, both of which to the viewer’s eye seem to be leading into the ever darkening, cold and inhospitable forest and to a quiet death from hypothermia? So, in summary, this picture is obviously nationalistic and is also, but less obviously, inviting the viewer to contemplate aloneness with very few possibilities of avoiding that loneliness before God, death itself.
Dr David Greenwood. D.greenwood@uwtsd.ac.uk May 2021
[i] This illustrated image has been taken from : http://wessweb.info/index.php/Into_the_Imagined_Forest
[ii] The Book of Common Prayer for Use in the Church in Wales Cardiff Church in Wales Publications 1984 pp. 473-4.
[iii] Koerner, J. pp. 161-2. Merleau-Ponty was a philosopher, following in the existentialist mould of Husserl. He is particularly renowned for his work on the phenomenology of perception and has written The Visible and the Invisible. For more detail see the article on website: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty/#pagetopright
[iv] Hofmann, W. p. 96.
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