Bohemian Landscape with Mount Milleschauer

In 1808 a landscape painting was still expected to be tidy, with a foreground, a middle distance and a framing tree to lead the eye in. Friedrich had walked through the Central Bohemian Uplands the summer before, sketching as he went, and when he worked those studies up he did something quieter and stranger. He lined the two peaks up parallel to the edge of the canvas, Milešovka on the right and Kletečna beside it, and let the land simply lie there under a wide, even sky, with nothing staged to guide you. The picture and its evening-light companion were bought that same year by Count Franz Anton of Thun-Hohenstein for his castle at Tetschen, the same house that would soon hang Friedrich's most argued-over work, a landscape treated as an altarpiece.