The Cross Beside The Baltic

By 1815 the wars that had run across Europe for a generation were finally ending, and Friedrich, who had grown up on the Baltic coast at Greifswald, turned back to the twilight and night scenes he had set aside for a while. A single wooden cross stands on a rocky spur above the sea, catching the last cold light of the day. For a devout Protestant like Friedrich, planting the cross alone in open nature, with no church anywhere around it, was a quiet claim that faith belonged in the landscape itself. The grey water stretching out below is the same Baltic he had known since childhood.