Landscape On Rügen With Rainbow

Friedrich fell for the island of Rügen, off Germany's Baltic coast, on a long walking trip in 1801 and filled sketchbooks with its bare hills and wide sky. Years later, back in his Dresden studio around 1809, he built this landscape from those memories: a lone shepherd resting on a slope under a full rainbow, the whole scene ordered with almost mathematical care. He painted it while Napoleon's armies dominated the German lands, and quiet pictures like this carried, for many Germans, a feeling of home worth holding onto. There is one hard fact about it now. The painting was moved for safekeeping in the Second World War and has been missing since 1945. What you see is a record of a work no one has been able to find since.