Rocks

In the summer of 1811 Caspar David Friedrich made a walking tour through the Harz mountains of central Germany, sketching as he went, and small dark studies like this one came out of that trip. It is a modest thing, barely larger than a sheet of paper, a cluster of boulders and a still pool closed in by dense, overlapping trees, worked almost entirely in browns and deep greens. Contemporaries thought it unfinished, and its heavy, shadowed tone unsettled them. Friedrich usually built his landscapes indoors from careful drawings rather than painting on the spot, which is why even a rough patch of rock in his hands feels arranged and deliberate. A fellow Dresden painter, seeing his small pictures that June, summed this one up simply as somber.