Schwäne im Schilf

Goethe climbed to Caspar David Friedrich's Dresden studio in 1810 and came away with two sepia drawings. Within a few years he had cooled on him. Goethe was promoting Luke Howard's new classification of clouds and wanted Friedrich to draw the types for it. Friedrich refused, saying it would overturn landscape painting, and Goethe concluded that this kind of Romanticism had turned too far inward. This small canvas, about 35 by 44 centimetres, is the sort of picture he meant. Two swans sit among reeds at the very bottom of the frame, a crescent moon and the evening star between them in violet twilight, the horizon pushed almost out of sight. Since 1938 it has hung in the Frankfurt house where Goethe was born, taken in first on loan and bought outright after the war.