Island Dreams

The island depictions in the maritime Belvedere are also surprisingly deserted coastal pictures. Their palette of daytime and seasons, however, is more fanned out, as is the weather. Let’s board a ship, again in the Venice Lagoon, this time with Hans Fronius and Ernst Höffinger on the “Torcello” and embark on a ‘Middle Cruise’ through the European Mediterranean and the marginal seas of the northern Atlantic.

First, the journey goes through the Adriatic, past the wintry “Fishermen’s Houses on Lussin” (Lošinj) and Osor on the island of Cres in Croatia––which Friedrich Beck captured in tempera like pendants––to the more colorful “Devil’s Islands near Hvar” by Kurt Conrad Loew. Here the sea is darker than the only suggested but luminous architectural landscapes. Through “The Ionian Sea near Corfu” (Emil Jakob Schindler), we aim for the easternmost turning point, the old Fort Saint Nicola (Rhodes) at the entrance to Mandraki Harbor in the Aegean, a suggestion by Fritzi Ecker-Houdek. With the western circumnavigation of Sicily, past the “Sea Coast with Monte Pellegrino near Palermo” (Leopold Carl Müller), the route leads into the Tyrrhenian Sea, directly towards the sunny island of Capri, to which Alfred Zoff and Carl Blechen have meanwhile added a few fair-weather clouds.

We then leave the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar, heading for the Canary Islands off the coast of North Africa. Fascinated, Ernestine Rotter-Peters captures the species-rich flora of Tenerife in tempera. Now the course changes to north-northeast, and behind the English Channel at the latest, the sea becomes rougher. Thus, Robert Russ shows us a view of the northern tip of “Helgoland” facing south in stormy seas, without the Lange Anna (Long Anna), a ‘surf pillar’ that is both the island's landmark and a natural monument. To heighten the drama, he adds a broken mast with yardarm in the foreground as well as numerous seagulls. August Schaeffer von Wienwald, on the other hand, shows us the island sweetly in the evening light with no wind and an almost surreal mirror-like sea. But past the North Frisian islands of Amrum (Irma Lang-Scheer) and Sylt (Emil Jakob Schindler), the journey ends on the Hither-Pomeranian island of Hiddensee (Irma Lang-Scheer) rather in North German ‘Schmuddelwetter’ (‘dreary weather’) on the North Sea and Baltic Sea.

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