Mountain landscape in Bohemia

By the 1890s Caspar David Friedrich was close to forgotten, and the Norwegian art historian Andreas Aubert set out to find what was left. In the family's old house on the market square in Greifswald, then owned by the painter's nephew, he came across this small summer landscape. He was sure it showed Bohemia, and called it one of the most serious, genuine landscapes he had seen in German art. Friedrich built it from three horizontal bands of grassy plain, blue-grey mountains and drifting cloud, with a thin yellow strip of cornfield between the green and the lead-grey hills. The range may be the Giant Mountains with the Schneekoppe as its peak, though nobody has pinned the place down. In December 1904 Alfred Lichtwark, director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, bought it from the family after almost losing it to Berlin's Nationalgalerie, and wrote that he felt like celebrating with a bottle of champagne.