Lot 1101 Dα

At the age of 18, Carl Hasenpflug began an apprenticeship as a decorative painter in the workshop of Carl Wilhelm Gropius. However, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, for whom Gropius created theatre decorations at the time, played a decisive role in his further development. Schinkel's famous painting "Gothic Cathedral in Winter" from 1813/14 is likely to have left a lasting impression on the young painter. After early city views, Hasenpflug soon specialised in the depiction of medieval buildings, especially after he moved to Halberstadt in 1830.
Here he painted his winterly, mostly snow-covered churches or ruins - Magdeburg Cathedral, Heisterbach Abbey, Walkenried Monastery, for example - but above all many other, non-localisable architectural motifs that are a distinctive part of his repertoire. It was probably not the buildings themselves that primarily interested the painter, but the romanticised mood they evoked in the viewer. Thus his gaze - as in this painting from 1844 - wanders from an abandoned medieval building surrounded by toppled stones out into the cold, deserted winter landscape.