Landscape with Temple in Ruin

In 1797 Caspar David Friedrich was in his early 20s and finishing his training at the Academy in Copenhagen. The lone figures, the vast still skies and the mountains of moonlit solitude that would make him famous were still ahead of him. In these student years he worked mostly in ink, sepia and watercolour, so an oil painting like this one is unusual for him. It shows a quiet landscape with the broken remains of a temple, the kind of ruin that Europe's Romantic generation loved for the way it set human ambition against the slow patience of nature. He would settle in Dresden the following year and spend the rest of his life there.