Lot 1515 Rα

Carl Maria Nicolaus Hummel was the son of the famous composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel. He was a pupil and employee of Friedrich Preller the Elder from 1834 - 1842. He undertook numerous sojourns with the painter, and thus the young Hummel accompanied his teacher to Rügen in 1839. For Preller, this was the second of three trips to the island in the Baltic, and he stayed there for around 20 days together with Hummel and Ferdinand Bellermann, a further pupil of his. He may have been inspired by Caspar David Friedrich's famous landscapes of the island, such as “Chalk Cliffs on Rügen” from 1818, which was a seminal work of the German Romantic movement (Museum Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur).
Thus far, we know of only two further Rügen landscapes by Hummel. One monogrammed and dated work reiterating the chalk cliffs motif “Kreidefelsen auf Rügen” in the Museum Georg Schäfer in Schweinfurt, which uses a very similar composition to Caspar David Friedrich's version. The second, auctioned by Sotheby's in Munich in 1994 entitled “Steilküste bei Saßnitz auf Rügen”, depicts a similar, tree-lined view of the sea to the present canvas.
In this work, the viewer's gaze is led downwards from a considerable height over a tree-lined gorge, the “grosse Jasmunder Bodden” bay is seen from the north on the left, and the cliffs of Arkona on Wittow are just visible in the background.