Woman on the beach of Ruegen

A woman in a red dress rests half-lying on a boulder at the water's edge, turned away from us. Just beyond her, fishing nets hang to dry on stakes along the shore, and out on the water a line of boats leans under brown sails. The pale strip of cliff on the horizon has been identified as the chalk coast at Arkona, the northern tip of Rügen. Friedrich came from Greifswald, on the mainland just across the water, and when he was born there in 1774 this whole coast belonged to Sweden as Swedish Pomerania. It became Prussian in 1815, about three years before he made this small canvas, barely 30 centimetres across. He also painted a related picture of a lady on a beach waving to a boat. That one belonged to the ducal museum in Gotha, and it burned in 1931 in the fire at the Munich Glaspalast, together with eight other paintings of his.