Drifting Clouds

In 1816 Goethe, deep in his own study of the weather, tried to get Friedrich to paint clouds according to the classification the English chemist Luke Howard had published in 1803, the one that gave us cirrus, cumulus and stratus. Friedrich would not do it. Sorting clouds into types, he thought, would be the undoing of landscape painting. A few years later he painted this, a canvas smaller than a sheet of writing paper, 18 by 25 centimetres, with bands of cloud crossing a mountain view and swallowing most of it. It looks like something dashed off in the open air, and it is not. He built it in the studio, most likely from a drawing he had made high on the Brocken in the Harz mountains and dated 29 June 1811, nine years or so before. Hamburg bought it in 1906.