While the window appears in paintings throughout the

While the window appears in paintings throughout the early-modern period, it was at the beginning of the 19th Century that it took on a more self-standing role and new meaning. As Sabine Rewald writes in the catalogue Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century, published to accompany a 2011 exhibition at The Met, in the open window motif, "the Romantics found a potent symbol for the experience of standing on the threshold between an interior and the outside world". Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was Germany's most renowned Romantic painter and the first to capitalise on the motif's poetic potential. This power of suggestion is embodied in his Woman at a Window of 1822.