West facade of the Eldena ruins

Friedrich grew up in Greifswald on the Baltic coast, and just outside town stood the shell of Eldena, a medieval abbey emptied at the Reformation, battered in war, and quarried for its brick until only fragments stood. He drew it again and again, and it was the tall west front, this jagged gable pierced by an empty window, that held him most. Around 1806 he set it down closely from studies made on the spot. Years later he would lift this same ruin into his darker painted scenes, half-buried in snow or rising behind bare oaks. Here it is quieter and more exact, a real building he had walked up to and measured with his eye.