The Interior of the Palm House on the Pfaueninsel Near Potsdam

Lush palms and overgrown greenery dominate this view of the Palm House, designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel to display the Prussian royals’ collection of tropical plants. This painting plays with the boundaries between architecture and nature, imagination and reality: vines curl around soaring columns and bowed fronds evoke archways. Carl Blechen populated his dazzling place-portrait with a leisure scene derived from colonialist fantasies of non-European women. The artist dressed the figures in rich textiles that echo the building’s colors and motifs, as if he considered them an extension of the decor.

The short career of Carl Blechen, a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century German painting, marked the transition from Romanticism to a more realistic view of nature. Inspired in part by his encounter with the Italian landscape and light during a trip he made around 1828 or 1829, Blechen developed a fluid technique that enabled him to capture fleeting atmospheric effects. He often used his landscapes as settings for mysterious figures, reflecting his early contact with Romantic painting and theater.