Dolmen in Autumn

Around 1820 Friedrich painted this in Dresden: a prehistoric stone tomb on a low rise, ringed by old oaks that have dropped most of their leaves. Germans of his day called such megaliths Hünengräber, giants' graves, and read them as relics of a deep ancestral past, older than any cathedral or kingdom. Friedrich sought them out on the flat northern coast where he had grown up. He gives you no figures and no path in, only the heavy capstone and its supports, the leaning trees, and a pale, cooling light. Everything in the scene is at an ending, the year, the leaves, and the ancient dead under the slab. The oaks are half-bare, keeping just enough foliage to fix the moment in late autumn.