1834
oil
canvas
From the collection of Art Institute of Chicago
The Interior of the Palm House on the Pfaueninsel Near Potsdam is a 1834 oil by Carl Blechen, a German Romanticism work, held at Art Institute of Chicago.
This painting shows a lush greenhouse filled with palm trees and tangled vines. It was made in 1834 by Carl Blechen. The building itself looks almost swallowed by the plants growing inside. The artist added human figures dressed in exotic costumes. They blend into the scene like part of the decor. The light through the glass roof makes everything glow. The figures come from colonial fantasies about faraway places. Look up Carl Blechen next.
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…
Bought by Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia from the artist in 1834 for 1000 Taler [acc. to records of Friedrich Wilhelm III’s acquisitions in Archiv der Verwaltung der Staatlichen Schlösser und Garten in Potsdam-Sanssouci: “28.11.1834 Blechen ‘Palmenhaus’ 200 Frd. Cour Die Kaiserinn” and “181. Journal Nr. 638. Blechen Palmenhaus 200 Frd. Cour,” see Uwe Simmons, research paper, ms, 1994, copy in curatorial file]; possibly given to his daughter Charlotte, the Tsarina Alexandra Fedorovna, wife of Tsar Nicholas I in November 1834; possibly part of the Russian imperial collection until after…
Berlin, Akademie der Künste, XXVIII. Kunstaustellung der Königlichen Akademie der Künste, 1834, cat. 72.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Carl Eduard Ferdinand Blechen (29 July 1798 – 23 July 1840) was a German landscape painter and a professor at the Academy of Arts, Berlin. His distinctive style was characteristic of the Romantic ideals of natural beauty.
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