Grabmal

The museum’s title means “tomb”, and its record notes that tombs had become a fixed part of everyday culture, in gardens as in the visual arts, by the age of sensibility and the Romanticism that followed. Blechen, born in Cottbus in 1789, was a Berlin painter who made his name with landscapes and only late turned to the easel pictures of his last years; he was appointed professor of landscape painting at the Berlin academy in 1831 and died in 1840. Catalogued as inventory A III 855 and painted on paper laid on panel, the small study was bought in 1891 from the collection of the Berlin banker Christian Wilhelm Brose, whose bequest had come to the museum in the same year. It is held in the Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.