Walkenried Monastery Ruins

1839

The subject

Walkenried was the most popular monastery ruin among painters in the Harz, a true paradise for artists. Our location is inside the former church, looking out towards the large west window. The enormous dimensions of 90 metres in length now radiate emptiness, as only a few remnants have been preserved. But just imagine how many stones once had to be quarried, transported, shaped, polished and, above all, set on top of each other!

Here there was a sense of forest solitude, as is typical for Cistercian foundations. Now the monastery lies in a small, charming village. The cloister next to the church, once the monks’ residence, has been transformed into an interesting museum. There you can learn more about this largest monastic church in northern Germany, built by the Cistercians between 1206 and 1290. You’ll find out about architectural and especially mining know-how that the Cistercians brought from France thanks to their international order structure, as well as about princely tax privileges, investments and success. Walkenried and the Upper Harz mining area are now even part of the UNESCO World Heritage.

But more than 200 years ago, when this painting was created, everything here was silent and desolate. Artists opened people’s eyes to the significance of the ancient walls. In 1817, the ongoing use as a quarry was finally stopped. In his painting, Carl Hasenpflug expresses both sorrow and joy, something we usually only associate with beautiful music.

To the painter’s viewpoint location

Artist

created

119 x 105 cm

Exhibition catalogue, Städtisches Museum Halberstadt 2002, p. 267

Hiking tip

Walkenried is well connected to the regional railway Göttingen–Nordhausen, and the monastery is definitely worth a visit. Maybe combine it with a visit to the museum, or a circular walk past the monastery ponds, over the Höllstein (with a lovely view) to the Sachsenstein and back. (6 kilometres)

About the artist

The painter Carl Hasenpflug (1802–1858) initially specialised in city views and images of intact Gothic architecture. He was from Berlin but turned his back on the growing metropolis and settled in Halberstadt in 1830. We have magnificent paintings by him of the cathedrals of Halberstadt and Magdeburg. It’s quite remarkable that, after a brief period as a landscape painter in the early 1830s, he spent decades painting nothing but ruins in the snow. Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings of ruins in the snow, twenty years earlier, had gone out of fashion; the painter was old and no longer in demand. Then along came Carl Hasenpflug, who could have been Friedrich’s son, reinventing the motif of ruins in the snow — and it struck a chord with the time. There were several extremely cold winters in the mid-1830s. Did this make such paintings so appealing, or are there other reasons?

More than fifty depictions of very different monastery ruins in winter, painted between 1840 and 1870 by Carl Hasenpflug and others, can be counted. They belong to a period when industrialisation, poverty, and failed attempts at democracy collided. Such a painting became a symbol of a present perceived as cold-hearted and focused on novelty and progress — a present in which magnificent Gothic buildings became ruins, also because true faith no longer enlivened them. The painting is therefore a wistful look back at the past, which is why music is present in it as well.

Music in the picture

Humans have seven senses. Can painting create a sound that stimulates one sense through another? What the Romantics once believed has now been scientifically proven. Let’s try to describe the music in this picture: the main sound is the chill of morning. It has just snowed. We stand inside the ruins of the church, surrounded by walls and a few spruces forming an enclosed space. In front of us, an abyss softens the sound. In contrast, festive like the blare of a trumpet, is the motif in the centre of the picture – the ruined west façade of the monastery church – partly already in sunlight. Very close, almost painfully precise, we can see the damage along the broken lines and joints. In this picture, grandeur and destruction meet! A romantic sound full of tension, then.

For comparison

Wilhelm Steuerwaldt, Monastery Ruins of Walkenried (view from the cloister towards the remains of the church choir), 1852, oil on canvas, 84.5 x 76.2 cm, Municipal Museums Jena / Romantikerhaus, Inv. No. I, 1412

Walkenried, Steuerwaldt — © Städtische Museen Jena

Wilhelm Steuerwaldt followed his teacher Carl Hasenpflug so closely in depicting snow-covered monastery ruins that his paintings are sometimes difficult to distinguish from Hasenpflug’s. But his tone is not as clear; it is softer, perhaps even more affectionate. In this painting, the reflection of a fire in the cloister also softens the cold outside by the ruin.

Johann Poppel after Ludwig Rohbock, Walkenried, 1854, steel engraving, plate size 16.9 x 23.5 cm, from:

Original Views of the Most Historically Remarkable Cities in Germany, edited by Gustav Georg Lange in Darmstadt, vol. 11, 1854, from the collections of Schloss Wernigerode GmbH, Collection Bürger

As always, Ludwig Rohbock (1824–1893) is the master of accurately describing what he sees. For his overall view, he looks for a location where the height of the monastery complex contrasts well with the small residential buildings of the present. That was the Kupferberg, over which the Harz border trail runs along the Green Belt. Today, this view is largely overgrown.

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