Two men contemplating the Moon

In 1819 a radical student murdered the playwright August von Kotzebue, and the German states answered with the Carlsbad Decrees. Censorship tightened, student societies were broken up, and the so-called Old German costume worn by young nationalists came to be treated as a sign of subversion. Friedrich dressed his two moon-watchers in exactly that. A writer who visited his Dresden studio in April 1820 noted Friedrich's dry comment on the first version of this picture, now in Dresden: the two men, he said, were plotting demagogic intrigues. This canvas at the Met is a later repetition, painted around 1825 to 1830, after he had also made a version with a man and a woman. The thin crescent is a waxing moon, its dark side faintly lit, and the small bright point just to its right is the evening star, Venus.