Detail from “Interior with Young Woman Tracing a Flower” by Martin Drolling, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Rooms with A View: The Open Window in the 19th Century,” is more than a little familiar to us, thanks to our recurring back-page series "Room with a View." But this exhibit, which opened last week and continues through July 4, features paintings and drawings that depict their subjects’ private lives as well as the historic events taking place outside their windows.
Drawn from collections in Europe and the U.S., the 57 19th-century pieces are spread though four rooms, each with a different focus. The various compositions—interiors with figures, artist’s studios, empty rooms, and drawings—are united by their defiance of the artistic norms of the time such as formal portraits and large-scale historical paintings.
Instead, the works address the tumultuous events of the era through small details, such as a bloodied foot, representing a war injury, in a painting by Wilhelm Bendz. The painting ”Woman at the Window” by Caspar David Friedrich, depicts a woman looking longingly out the window, seemingly trapped in her room. It's a fitting inclusion: The original room with a view is from the E.M. Forster novel, A Room with a View, about a young woman’s experience in the repressive society of early 20th-century England.
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