The Interior of the Palm House on the Pfaueninsel Near Potsdam

1834

Carl Blechen (German, 1798–1840)

Lush palms and overgrown greenery dominate this view of the Palm House, a country estate designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel to display the Prussian royals’ collection of tropical plants. This painting plays with the boundaries between architecture and nature, imagination and reality: vines curl around soaring columns and bowed fronds evoke archways. Carl Blechen populated his dazzlingly specific place-portrait with a leisure scene derived from colonialist fantasies of non-European women. The artist dressed the figures in rich textiles that echo the building’s colors and motifs, as if he considered them an extension of the décor.

Status: On View, Gallery 221
Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Artist: Carl Blechen
Title: The Interior of the Palm House on the Pfaueninsel Near Potsdam
Place: Germany (Artist's nationality:)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 1834
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 135 × 126 cm (52 1/2 × 50 in.); Framed: 155 × 145.5 cm (61 × 57 1/4 in.)
Credit Line: Through prior acquisitions of the George F. Harding Collection; L.L. and A.S. Coburn and Alexander A. McKay endowments; through prior gift of William Wood Prince; through prior acquisitions of the Charles H. and Mary F.S. Worcester Endowment
Reference Number: 1996.388
IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.: https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/144969/manifest.json

Anonymous review of exhibition at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Museum, Blätter für bildende Kunst, ed. F. Kugler (October 6, 1834), p. 323.
O.F. Gruppe, review of exhibition at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Allgemeinen Preussischen Staatszeitung (November 29, 1834), no. 311, p. 1347.
Atanazy von Raczynski, Geschichte der neueren deutschen Kunst, vol. 3 (Berlin, 1841), p. 97.
Gert Bartoschek in Johann Gottfried Schadow, Kunstwerke und Kunstansichten: Ein Quellenwerk zur Berliner Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte zwischen 1780 und 1845, ed. Götz Eckardt, vol. 3 (Berlin, 1987), p. 742.
Utta Simmons, “Die Innenansichten des Palmenhauses auf der Pfaueninsel von Carl Blechen 1832–1834,” master thesis (Technische Universität Berlin, 1989).
Helmut Börsch–Supan in Carl Blechen, Zwischen Romantik und Realismus, exhib. cat., ed. Peter–Klaus Schuster (Berlin: Nationalgalerie, 1990), p. 124, under no. 67.
Virginia Voedisch in The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Studies 28, 1(2002), pp. 84 (ill.), 85.

Berlin, Akademie der Künste, XXVIII. Kunstaustellung der Königlichen Akademie der Künste, 1834, cat. 72.

Bought by Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia from the artist in 1834 for 1000 Taler [acc. to records of Friedrich Wilhelm III’s acquisitions in Archiv der Verwaltung der Staatlichen Schlösser und Garten in Potsdam-Sanssouci: “28.11.1834 Blechen ‘Palmenhaus’ 200 Frd. Cour Die Kaiserinn” and “181. Journal Nr. 638. Blechen Palmenhaus 200 Frd. Cour,” see Uwe Simmons, research paper, ms, 1994, copy in curatorial file]; possibly given to his daughter Charlotte, the Tsarina Alexandra Fedorovna, wife of Tsar Nicholas I in November 1834; possibly part of the Russian imperial collection until after 1917. Swiss collection by c. 1920. Daxer and Marshall, Munich and James Mackinnon, London, by 1996; sold to the Art Institute, 1996.

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Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

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