Attributed to Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich worked in Dresden among painters who learned from him and borrowed his motifs. Carl Gustav Carus, a Dresden doctor who painted landscapes alongside his medical career, was his friend from 1817, and the Norwegian painter Johan Christian Dahl lived in the same house on the Elbe from 1823. Their landscapes can come very close to his, which is one reason a museum sometimes hesitates over a picture in his manner.

Attributed to is the label for that hesitation. It says the museum believes Friedrich painted the work himself without being able to prove it. Most judgements lean on the catalogue of his work that the art historians Helmut Börsch-Supan and Karl Wilhelm Jähnig published in 1973, and even that does not settle every case. A winter landscape with a church, owned by the museum in Dortmund since 1940, was long taken for the only version, until a near-identical canvas surfaced in a private collection in 1982 and the National Gallery in London bought it in 1987.