Die Gartenlaube

This is one of Friedrich's smallest paintings, barely the size of a sheet of paper. He made it in 1818, the year the 44-year-old painter finally married, and it feels like a picture made in a settled, private mood rather than his usual vast lonely coastlines. A man in a beret and a woman wrapped in a shawl stand with their backs to us in a garden arbour, looking out toward the tower of the church of St Nikolai in Greifswald, the Baltic town where Friedrich grew up. The pose of figures seen from behind, gazing into the distance, was his signature, repeated across his major works. This little panel stayed in private hands for generations and only entered the Munich gallery in 1995.