Schiff im Morgennebel

Caspar David Friedrich lived in Dresden on the river Elbe, and around 1821 he painted this ship coming out of the morning fog on that same water. Friedrich rarely painted anything simply for how it looked. Fog, for him and for the Romantic writers he knew, was the edge of the visible, the point where the eye gives out and something larger is felt just beyond it. So the ship is precise where the mist lets it be seen, its masts and rigging drawn with almost technical care, and then it dissolves. He worked in a Germany of small states still unsettled after the Napoleonic wars, where many artists were turning inward, to landscape and mood, rather than grand history. The water here is glassy and nearly still, the light just beginning.