Half-Timbered Square, Frankfurt
A contemporary oil on canvas depicting one of Frankfurt's half-timbered squares, painted in 2023. At 30 by 22 inches, the composition frames the characteristic steep gables and close-set timber-framed facades that define the reconstructed Altstadt quarter, with café awnings marking the human scale along the lower edge of the scene.
Frankfurt's old town was largely destroyed in 1944 and its celebrated Römerberg and surrounding streets rebuilt or restored across subsequent decades, with the most recent phase of reconstruction completed only in 2018. Painting this subject in 2023 means engaging with architecture that is simultaneously ancient in form and newly made, a tension that lends the motif an unusual quality: the picturesque is also, in a sense, a considered act of civic imagination. The broken sky above the gables introduces movement and atmosphere into what might otherwise read as a purely architectural study, pulling the scene toward something more contingent and felt.