Night in a Harbour

Two women stand wrapped in black at a railing late at night, their backs to us, looking out over a harbor. Behind them the pointed Gothic spires of a town and the bare masts of moored ships rise into a strange greenish light. Caspar David Friedrich painted this around 1818, and the port is thought to be Stralsund on the Baltic, near where he grew up. Friedrich rarely just showed a place. The upright figures echo the church towers and the masts, drawing the eye from the earthly harbor toward the night sky, the quiet religious feeling he pressed into ordinary coastal scenes. The future tsar Nicholas of Russia bought the picture from the artist's Dresden studio in 1820, which is how it reached the Hermitage.