Cross in the Mountains

At Christmas 1808 Friedrich set off a quarrel in Dresden with a landscape painted as an altarpiece, a crucifix on a rocky summit among firs, and one critic asked in print whether landscape had any place on an altar at all. After about 1812 the cross in open country almost disappears from his painting. This tall, round-topped canvas, well over a metre high and made in the early 1820s, is the notable exception. Once more a cross rises from a crag among fir trees against a glowing sky, and at its centre hangs a wreath, the crown of thorns named in one of the titles the picture has carried. It is also catalogued as The Ilsenstein, after a granite crag in the Harz mountains where, in 1814, a local count put up an iron cross for comrades killed fighting Napoleon. In 1939 a scholar suggested Friedrich had painted his landscape altar a third time for the ducal house of Gotha, and the picture was long connected with Duke August of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, a collector who died in 1822. The foundation at Schloss Friedenstein that owns it has lately been re-examining that link.