Monk in the Snow

Friedrich painted this in 1808, in a Germany largely under Napoleon's control, when a quiet inward Romanticism was one of the few things left to hold onto. A single monk stands small in a field of snow beside bare oaks, dwarfed by the winter and the sky. Friedrich liked these lone figures seen from behind or at a distance, a person set against something far larger. The picture, sometimes called simply Winter, hung for over a century in German collections. On 6 June 1931 it was in Munich's Glaspalast when the exhibition hall caught fire overnight and burned to the ground. We know it now only from old photographs.