Winter Landscape by Caspar David Friedrich

Winter Landscape by Caspar David Friedrich (1811)

Snow, stumps and a dark sky

The picture is divided almost exactly in half. The lower half is snow: a white plain, gently rising and falling, running back to a flat horizon. The upper half is sky, not blue but a heavy grey-black that seems to press down on the land.

Across the snow stand the remains of a wood. In the foreground a huge dead tree leans hard to the right, its trunk split and its roots torn half out of the ground, its broken limbs reaching out of the picture at the top right. Further left an upright trunk rises into a few stunted branches with snow along their tops; a spray of rust-brown dead leaves still clings to a branch beside it. Everywhere else there are stumps: a row of them at the left, squared off where the trees were cut, others dotted across the middle distance, and a jagged broken stump in the snow at the lower left. Small bare saplings and a fallen branch lie at the right.

The traveller

Between the two big trunks, small and dark against the snow, is a single figure. He is bent forward and leans on a crutch. There is no path, no house and no shelter in sight, and nothing to show where he is going.

The National Gallery in London describes him as a tiny figure, leaning on a crutch, staring at a deserted, snow-covered landscape under a grey-black sky. The French Wikipedia article on the painting quotes a German journal review of 1812 which saw in the old, weary man on crutches an allusion to winter as the last season of life, so that the landscape itself becomes an allegory.

Its companion in London

The painting has a pair. The National Gallery's Winter Landscape (NG6517), probably also of 1811 and of exactly the same size, is described by the gallery as a pendant to this one. In the London picture a man has thrown aside his crutches and lies against a large boulder in the snow, praying before a shining crucifix sheltered by three fir trees, while the silhouette of a Gothic church rises in the mist behind. The gallery puts the contrast plainly: if the Schwerin picture is one of desolation and despair, the London one offers the hope of resurrection through Christian faith. The London painting was exhibited in Weimar in 1811.

Seen together, the two canvases tell a before and after. On its own, the Schwerin picture shows only the before: the cut and broken wood, the empty plain, the man still on his crutches, with no cross and no church anywhere in view.

The painter

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) was, in the National Gallery's words, one of the principal figures of German Romantic art. He trained as a draughtsman and topographical artist. The churches in his pictures, the gallery notes, are usually imagined, though often based on studies of real buildings such as the Marienkirche in Neubrandenburg.

The painting today

The painting is in the Staatliches Museum Schwerin in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. It is oil on canvas and small, recorded on Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata as 32.5 by 45 centimetres, the same size the National Gallery gives for its London companion.

About this print

Made from a photograph of the whole canvas in its landscape format, keeping the proportion Friedrich chose, with the dark sky taking up half the picture.

Sources: Wikimedia Commons, File:Winter_Landscape_by_Caspar_David_Friedrich.jpg · Wikidata Q18602473 · Wikipedia (French), "Paysage d'hiver (Friedrich)" · National Gallery, London, NG6517, Caspar David Friedrich, "Winter Landscape" (nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/caspar-david-friedrich-winter-landscape)