Death of the Old

I'm currently writing a paper for my Later English Masterworks class (we just finished studying the Romantic Period), and part of the assignment is to connect a piece of literature that we've studied (or an idea prevalent to the whole of the Romantic Period) to a piece of artwork created in the same period. I chose Caspar David Friedrich's Abbey in an Oak Forest (1810).

I think it speaks to the death of everything that came before. The abbey wall is the last piece of the structure left standing, and it is surrounded by a grove of barren trees. Who knows what exactly the artist meant for people to see in this piece but I, for one, have found that the abbey wall could represent the gravestone of what it was made for.

So many artists (literary and visual alike) threw away the old ways of thinking, which focused heavily on the masses, and embraced individualistic notions and concepts.

What do you think?