Riesengebirge Landscape

By the time this was painted, around 1835, Caspar David Friedrich had fallen out of fashion. The younger German public wanted something warmer than his silent, God-haunted distances, and commissions had thinned. In 1835 he also suffered a stroke that left his right arm partly paralysed, and his painting years were nearly over. The mountains are the Riesengebirge, the range on the old Bohemian border that he had hiked as a young man and drawn many times from memory. He builds the view as receding walls of rock, each ridge a paler blue than the one before, until the farthest dissolves into the sky. There are no figures, only that slow retreat of the land into light.