Sea Shore in Moonlight

In June 1835 Caspar David Friedrich suffered what was probably a stroke, and his painting hand stayed partly paralysed. That October he wrote that he had dared to paint again and was surprised it went well. This dark, unusually large seascape is one of the results, and one of the last oils he ever finished. For the scene he reached back nearly ten years, to a drawing he had made on the beach at Sassnitz on the island of Rugen in 1826, but he stripped the foreground almost bare, dropping the rowboats, a ship's mast and the anchors of the sketch. What is left is a low shore, a band of wet sand catching the moon, a few boats far out, and a sky that takes up most of the canvas. It was shown in Dresden in 1836, the year before the Saxon Art Society bought it.