Seashore with fisherman

Friedrich came to oil paint late. For years he worked only in pencil and sepia wash, and it was around 1807, in his early thirties, that he began the seascapes that would make his name. This is one of those first attempts. A single fisherman stands on a flat Baltic shore beside his boat, sea and sky merging into a pale haze with almost no horizon to hold onto. He painted it while Napoleon's armies occupied much of the German lands after the defeat at Jena the year before, and that feeling of a small figure alone before something vast runs through everything he made in these years. The coast is the Baltic he had grown up beside, near Greifswald, then still under Swedish rule.