The Oaktree in the Snow

The oak already carried a heavy load in German art by 1829. In the Ossian poems, which Goethe's Werther made famous in Germany in 1774, oaks went together with heroes and their graves, and in the years of the wars against Napoleon the tree took on a patriotic meaning. Friedrich painted oaks more often than any other tree, usually around a churchyard or a prehistoric burial mound, and often in late autumn or winter. Here the graves and ruins are gone. One half-dead oak stands in an open snowfield, with the twisted remains of a fallen trunk at its foot and a few brown leaves still hanging on the lower branches. The Berlin museum calls this the most concentrated version of a winter motif he had been painting since 1807. Two of those earlier pictures no longer exist. One burned in the fire at Munich's Glass Palace in 1931, and another was lost in the Second World War.