Sea beach in the fog

This is one of Caspar David Friedrich's first works in oil. Until around 1807 he had worked mostly in pencil and sepia wash, and here, in his early thirties, he tries the new medium on a subject he would return to for the rest of his life. Fog covers almost everything. A rocky shore in low earth tones runs across the foreground, and beyond it two sailing boats hang faintly in the mist, so pale they seem about to dissolve into the grey where sea and sky have stopped being separate. There is no horizon to hold on to. The whole thing is small, about the size of a sheet of writing paper.