An owl on a bare tree

Friedrich made this small painting of an owl on a dead tree around 1834, in the last productive years before a stroke ended his career. By then the German public had largely moved on from his solemn landscapes, and he was poor and increasingly shut away in Dresden. In his younger work he liked to set a lone human figure with its back to us, gazing into the distance. Here that figure is gone and an owl takes its place, perched against a pale evening sky. Friedrich returned to owls again and again in these final years, birds he linked to night and to death, setting them on graves and coffins as well as bare branches like this one.