Wreck in the Sea of Ice

This is a small, early work, painted around 1798 when Caspar David Friedrich was in his mid-twenties, not long out of his training in Copenhagen. It shows a ship crushed and tilting in a field of broken sea ice under a pale northern sky. Friedrich came from Greifswald on the Baltic coast, where hard winters locked the shore in ice, and the wreck theme clearly caught him young. Here the scale is intimate and the ship is still whole enough to recognise, painted thinly on a panel barely larger than a book. A quarter of a century later he returned to the same subject far more grandly in his famous Sea of Ice, where slabs heap into a jagged pyramid over a crushed hull, and that later canvas now hangs in the same Hamburg museum as this early one.