The Monk in the Snow by Caspar David Friedrich

The Monk in the Snow by Caspar David Friedrich, 1808

A ruin in winter

A slope of snow runs across the bottom of the picture. Above it stands the ruined choir of a Gothic church, roofless, its tall pointed window empty, snow lying along its ledges and broken tracery. Bare oaks surround it. The largest, at the left, rises almost the full height of the canvas, its crown gone and its branches cut back to stumps; others stand behind the ruin, twisted and leafless. At the far left, half-buried, a row of gravestones marks a churchyard.

Mist fills the space behind, so that the ruin and the trees stand out against a grey that has no horizon. Near the foot of the ruin, very small, a monk with a staff walks through the snow toward the church. He is easy to miss; he is the only living thing in the picture.

Lost in 1931

This painting no longer exists. Friedrich's Monk in the Snow, also called Winter (Der Winter), was an oil on canvas of about 73 by 106 centimetres, dated 1807–08 or 1808, and was part of the Bavarian State Painting Collections. In June 1931 it was lent to an exhibition of German Romantic painting, from Friedrich to Moritz von Schwind, in the Glaspalast in Munich. In the early hours of 6 June 1931 the Glaspalast burned down. The fire, later found to be arson, destroyed more than 3,000 works of art, among them more than 110 early nineteenth-century paintings, including many by Friedrich, Schwind, Karl Blechen and Philipp Otto Runge.

Since the fire the picture has been known only through reproductions, and the image here is a black-and-white photograph of the lost canvas. It records the composition but not Friedrich's colours.

Summer and Winter

Friedrich conceived Winter as one of a pair with a Summer of the same year, and the two were meant to be read against each other. German scholarship also treats Winter as the direct forerunner of The Abbey in the Oakwood (1809–10): the ruin of the later picture is already here, seen from the side, and three of its oaks are already in place. In that later picture a procession of monks carries a coffin through the snow toward the ruined church; here there is one monk, alone.

Oaks of the same kind, cropped and stripped, recur across Friedrich's work of these years, including Cairn in Snow (1807), where three trees stand around a prehistoric grave. The trees in that picture have been traced to sketches Friedrich made near Neubrandenburg.

The painter

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) was born in Greifswald on the Baltic coast, then part of Swedish Pomerania, and was raised in his father's strict Lutheran faith. He studied in Copenhagen from 1794 to 1798 and then settled in Dresden, where he spent the rest of his life. He was one of the first painters to make winter itself the subject of a landscape, showing the land as stark and dead rather than as a setting for skaters and village life. His work fell from favour late in his life, and was taken up again from 1906, when thirty-two of his paintings were exhibited in Berlin.

Many of his pictures were lost in the Glaspalast fire, and this is one of them. What survives of Monk in the Snow is its composition: the ruin, the oaks, the snow and the one small figure walking toward the church.

Sources: Wikimedia Commons, File:Caspar David Friedrich 046 (Monk in the Snow).jpg · Wikidata Q18602442, Monk in the Snow · Wikipedia (de), Abtei im Eichwald · Wikipedia (de), Glaspalast (München) · Wikipedia, Glaspalast (Munich) · Wikipedia, Cairn in Snow · Wikipedia, Caspar David Friedrich