Evening with clouds

Around 1816 Goethe asked Friedrich to paint cloud studies following Luke Howard's new classification of cirrus, cumulus and stratus. Friedrich refused. Forcing free clouds into a rigid order, he said, would undermine the foundations of landscape painting. Then in the autumn of 1824 he went outside and did something close to it. The Norwegian painter Johan Christian Dahl had moved into his house in Dresden the year before, carrying oil sketches made in the open air in Italy, and for a few weeks Friedrich worked that way too. The Dresden Academy had made him an associate professor that year without giving him the chair in landscape painting he wanted. Three sky studies from those weeks are known, and this is one of them, small enough to hold in one hand, with the earth squeezed into a low violet band and everything above it given to evening cirrus.