Woman at a Window

The woman seen from behind is Caroline, the painter's wife, and the room is Caspar David Friedrich's own studio in Dresden, looking out over the Elbe. He married Caroline in 1818, and this quiet interior of 1822 is unusually domestic for him. Friedrich almost always turned his figures away from us so we look past them at the landscape, and here he does it inside four bare walls. The room is stripped and ordered, floorboards and shutters ruling straight lines, and the only opening onto the wider world is the window where Caroline leans to watch the masts of the boats on the river and the row of poplars on the far bank. Everything vivid and alive is out there, beyond the sill. The green of her dress is nearly the only strong colour indoors.