Neubrandenburg

The town on the horizon is Neubrandenburg, where both of Caspar David Friedrich's parents were born, its medieval gates and the tall spire of the Marienkirche cut sharp against an enormous sky. Friedrich painted it around 1816, in the years just after the wars against Napoleon, when many Germans looked back to the Gothic past of their towns as a kind of shared identity. The sky does most of the work, a band of hot gold along the horizon rising into heavy cloud, with two small figures below turned toward the light. It is dawn or evening, deliberately hard to tell. Friedrich returned to this skyline again and again from memory, painting the place of his family long after he had made his life away from it in Dresden.