Cold winter moon

Like Carl Malchin, Louis Douzette did not belong to the artists' colony of Ahrenshoop in the narrower sense, but was in contact with it. Born in Tribsees, Mecklenburg, he lived intermittently in Barth from 1852 until his death. Because studying at an academy was out of the question for financial reasons, Douzette visited Hermann Eschke's private "studio for landscape painting" in Berlin in 1863 and 1864. Convinced of his pupil's talent, Eschke encouraged his training and helped him unselfishly. Douzette's special ability to paint night scenes in shimmering moonlight soon became apparent. He oriented himself on the traditional lines of Romanticism and 17th century Dutch painting. His encounter with the art of Barbizon at the Forest of Fontainebleau, which he became acquainted with at the Paris World's Fair in 1878, also opened up open-air painting to him as an artistic path. From his home in Barth, Douzette explored the Darß with its extensive, primeval forest area.

In the painting "Cold Winter Moon" he took up a typical subject of his native coastal landscape. The seemingly lifeless vegetation, submerged under the weight of winter snow, crouched cottages whose windows send a comforting glow of warmth into the darkness, and the quiet, bent figure of a farmer or fisherman at the fence are the few individual motifs that the light of the late evening combines into an overall picture. The basic Romantic trait that comes to the fore here has been relativised by the credo of open-air painting, but not abolished. Especially in the branch of German landscape art that had been associated with the natural spectacles and artistic personalities of Norway since the Romantic period, this trait remained. For these painters, Ahrenshoop was one among several attractive study destinations on the Baltic Sea, ranking after Rügen, Vilm, Hiddensee and the Darß. It is revealing to see how strongly interest in the precepts of modern open-air painting spread in this circle as early as the 1880s and how early the Darß was also conquered artistically from Berlin.

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