After the Storm

In 1816 Goethe, who had been reading the English meteorologist Luke Howard's system for naming clouds, tried to persuade Friedrich to paint skies according to it. Friedrich said no. As the painter Louise Seidler passed on in a letter that October, he worried light, free clouds would be forced into categories. This small canvas, placed in Dresden in 1817 by an old inscription in another hand, shows what he did with weather instead. Sunlight pushes through a torn grey sky, rain hangs out over the sea, and white spray breaks around a wrecked sailing boat stuck fast among the rocks. The split mast still leans skyward, loose lines whipping in the wind, while the red-brown sail sinks. The boulders in the shallows probably come from studies he made on the coast of Rügen, the Baltic island he kept returning to.