Hermitary - Gallery - Art

About the images on this page

The interpretations of hermits in this gallery range from traditional (conventional, reflective), to imaginative and enigmatic modern projections.
Holbein created a series of images in which Death dances with his inevitable victims represented, a series of social types reminiscent of the stations of life represented in the Tarot. Some call the hermit depicted by Holbein an "old man" but he is indeed a hermit in Holbein's successors as well. In these latter versions, the hermit's reaction to Death is "stoical."
With Bloemaert, Dietrich, Schwind, Spitzweg, Dalziel, and Izraelian, early modern to modern, the hermit is traditional but do we not discern the artist's greater confidence as a modern observer still presenting a pressingly relevant ideal?
There is true innovation in our remaining artists. Caspar Friedrich depicts a modern version of the hermit in his wanderer and monk, where solitude is nature's decree, not merely human fate. Nature offers frighteningly unique events in twisted rocks, a chilling fate to human pretension. The abbey ruins, like Wordsworth's Tintern, reflect the impermanence of once noble efforts at impermanence. Freidrich presents original human curiousity about the nature of the universe, represented here by the couple staring at the moon, a suggestive work inspiring Beckett's Waiting for Godot. See also the separate galley of Freidrich.
Doré is everyone's favorite modern etcher of dramatic literary events, and hermits are among them. Finally, we see United States vistas as an opening of benign solitude in Gifford. But modernity and solitude again clash in Schiele and Ruesink, where the hermit is the self's shadow, pulling toward concealment and reclusion, unhappily, in the shadow of madness.