The Cemetery Entrance

A pair of heavy stone pillars, each capped with a funeral urn, frame an iron gate that stands just open. A withered wreath hangs at its centre, the sign of a recent burial, and beyond it the graveyard falls away into shadow and mist. Friedrich painted this in Dresden around 1825, in the years when he turned again and again to churchyards and graves. He had lost family early, among them a younger brother who drowned through the ice when Caspar was a boy. The gate is ajar rather than shut, so the threshold, not the tomb, becomes the subject. Two small figures stand at the entrance, about to step through.