The Cemetery Gate

In 1824 Friedrich was passed over for the chair of landscape painting at the Dresden Academy. He was given an honorary professorship with a small salary and no teaching, then fell ill and produced almost no oils for about two years. This small canvas, a little over 30 centimetres high, comes from the period just after that. The subject is a real place, the gate of the Priesnitz cemetery on the edge of Dresden, painted from so close that the gateposts fill the picture and block nearly everything beyond them, a few crosses and the top of a tower. Bremen dates it between 1825 and 1830. A much larger painting of the same gate, started around the same time and never finished, was still in Friedrich's studio when he died and is now in Dresden.