The Chasseur in the forest

Friedrich began this in the winter of 1813, as Napoleon's grip on the German lands was finally breaking. A lone soldier in French uniform, a chasseur, has wandered into a dense stand of dark firs that rises far above him and closes off any way out. He is small, on foot, his horse gone, dwarfed by a forest that feels less like scenery than like the country itself turning against him. On a tree stump in front of him a raven sits and calls, an old omen of death. Friedrich showed the picture in Dresden in 1814, the year the city was freed, where its meaning would have needed no explaining.