A wooded landscape with ruins and a view of Cologne, the High Cathedral of Saints Peter and Mary beyond

Reflecting the influence of German Romanticism, this rare work by Pascal rests on the boundary between pastoral idyll and patriotic cityscape. While the surrounding woodland in the foreground conveys the Romantic’s longing for an escape from the harshness of reality, the juxtaposition of the ruins to the right and Cologne in the distance symbolises the search for a national identity and the mythic origins of the Germanic nation. At the beginning of the 19th century, in a predominantly Protestant Germany, audiences were particularly drawn to nature as a direct vessel to God, and it is through Romantic idylls such as this that landscape artists were able to express their own quasi-religious venerations of nature.