Works with obviously religious motifs are rarely found in Ruth Baumgarte’s oeuvre. This large-format watercolor thus suggests that the artist had a special reason for selecting precisely this pictorial subject.

The head-high, tilted gravestones allow a view onto two church buildings, in which nature has already taken hold. While green-leaved trees indicate that it is summer, bare trees reveal the death of nature. The cemetery, too, appears to have been abandoned and left to decay. The dark colors in shades of rust red, blue, and gray intensify the gloomy atmosphere. Only in the tower area does a light color spectrum of delicate red to yellow tones shine as a hopeful counterbalance. The preliminary study of the motif reveals that the artist had already conceived the contrast between the darkly watercolored church and the bright atmosphere of light in her composition.

By making church ruins the subject of her painting, the artist chose a motif that is firmly anchored in the tradition of German Romanticism around 1800, including that of Caspar David Friedrich. For the first time, nature was elevated to a mirror of one’s own underlying mood, and ruins became the ideal visual metaphor for the transience and finiteness of life. For this sheet, Baumgarte once again used the special wet-in-wet technique of watercolor painting to express the passing of life also on a painterly level. The atmospheric watercolor alludes symbolically to the passing of her mother, Margarethe Kellner-Conrady, who had died in August of that year.