Early Snow

Friedrich painted this around 1827, when he was 53 and German taste had largely moved on from him. It appeared in 1828 under the title Spruce Forest in Winter. When the Berlin publisher who owned it died, it was sold on in 1842 as Fir Forest in Winter, and after that it dropped out of sight for two generations. The Hamburger Kunsthalle bought it in 1906, the same year the Nationalgalerie in Berlin put on its Centenary Exhibition of German art, which pulled Friedrich back into view after decades in which almost nobody wanted him. The composition is one he had used around 1813 in The Chasseur in the Woods, the same wall of snowbound firs seen head on, with the lost French soldier and the raven of that picture left out.