The big enclosure

By 1832 Caspar David Friedrich was slipping out of fashion. The Romantic mood he had helped shape was giving way to a more sober Germany, and his commissions were thinning. This is a real place, a marshy stretch of the Elbe floodplain northwest of Dresden called the Ostragehege, painted at dusk with the sun already down and the sky drained to cold gold and grey. Friedrich was 58. What still surprises people is the ground itself: he tips the wet flats up toward us until the channels of water curve like the edge of a globe, with one small boat left far out on them.