Oak in the Snow

By the late 1820s the taste of the German public was drifting away from Caspar David Friedrich. Younger painters were offering sunnier, more matter-of-fact landscapes, and his solemn, God-haunted views were starting to look old-fashioned. He had passed 50, was short of money, and increasingly alone. Around 1827 he painted this one old oak, bare and gnarled, standing in the snow on a canvas barely larger than a sheet of paper. The oak was a tree he came back to for most of his life. He studied real ones with great care and gave each its own crooked character, and a winter oak like this, stripped down and still holding its ground, carried for him the plain fact of endurance, of a living thing waiting out the cold. There is no path here and no figure, nothing to distract from the tree. Snow flattens the distance behind it, and the branches are left to draw their own dark lines against the pale sky.