Blechen became a professor of landscape painting in Berlin in 1831. Schinkel had recommended him ‘because of his ingenious approach to nature’. Blechen's own approach to the world is most evident in his oil sketches. His cornfield breaks the rules: the extremely wide and flat format is orientated more towards the artist's gaze than to the landscape and shows above all how the painter himself percieved it at this time. Neither the crooked trees nor the sandy hollow or the field were worthy of a painting, yet Blechen succeeded in creating a landscape of almost precious beauty with a fine balance and luminous colours.