Bushes in the snow

Friedrich is remembered for enormous, solemn distances, a lone figure staring out to sea or across fog. This painting is the reverse of that. He has knelt in the Dresden Heath, the scrubland east of the city where he often walked, and painted a single clump of leafless bushes rising from the snow, with barely a strip of pale sky above. There is no horizon to escape into and no human figure at all. He showed it in 1828 as From the Dresden Heath II, one of a pair. Its companion, a stand of young firs, now hangs in Munich, and scholars read the two as consecutive glimpses from a single winter walk, as if the painter had stopped and looked down. A reviewer that year admired how close to plain observation it felt.