Reefs by the Seashore

Friedrich painted this in 1824, a year that went badly for him. He had wanted the vacant chair of landscape painting at the Dresden Academy, was passed over and given an associate post instead, then fell ill for months and painted very little. The picture is tiny, 22 by 31 centimetres, and almost all blue, with a reef standing off an empty shore and the moon coming through thin cloud onto the water. He had never seen the place. The Karlsruhe museum thinks he worked from an English print of the Needles, the chalk stacks off the Isle of Wight, without leaving Saxony. It then hung unnoticed in the dining hall of a Mecklenburg country house for about a hundred years, and was identified again only in 1941.