Tree of crows

Friedrich painted this bare oak around 1822, in a Germany that had come out of the Napoleonic wars unsure of itself, where his generation increasingly looked to old landscapes and old graves for a sense of national past. He gives us a single twisted tree, stripped almost naked, with crows scattering into a cold evening sky. On the back of the canvas he left a note calling the low mound at the centre a Hünengrab, a prehistoric burial mound of the kind that dotted the north German coast. So the tree stands on the graves of the ancient dead. In the far distance, catching the last light, are the chalk cliffs of the island of Rügen, a place Friedrich returned to again and again.