Kügelgen's grave

On the morning of 27 March 1820, the Dresden portrait painter Gerhard von Kügelgen set out to check on the house being built for him at the edge of town and never came back. He had been robbed and killed on the road by a soldier, who was caught soon after. Kügelgen was one of Caspar David Friedrich's closest friends, and the shock ran through the small circle of Dresden artists they both belonged to. Friedrich answered it twice over. He designed the gravestone that was raised in the Catholic cemetery in the Friedrichstadt quarter, and then, in 1821 and 1822, he painted the grave itself as a consolation picture for the widow, who was leaving the city. The cemetery gate stands in shadow in the foreground with a bright landscape beyond it, and the birch branches by the stone lean upward, the sign of resurrection that Friedrich reached for again and again.