View of the Baltic Sea

Friedrich was born in Greifswald on the Baltic in 1774, which made him at birth a subject of the Swedish crown. Swedish Pomerania only passed to Prussia in 1815, when he was 41. He painted the sea from Dresden, some 400 kilometres inland, building small canvases like this one out of pencil studies made on trips back north. His Dresden studio was famously bare, a room with an easel, a chair and almost nothing else, because he wanted nothing in it competing with the picture he was carrying in his head. Russian buyers kept him solvent in these years. The poet Vasily Zhukovsky, tutor to the Russian imperial family, came to that studio in the early 1820s and went on placing Friedrich's work in St Petersburg for the rest of the painter's life.