Hombre y mujer contemplando la luna

Friedrich made this version around 1824, one of several he painted on the same idea over more than a decade. A man and a woman stand on a rocky path at dusk, seen from behind, looking up at the thin moon through the branches of a dead oak. Friedrich almost always turned his figures away from us like this. You do not watch them. You stand where they stand and look out at what they see, which was his way of pulling the viewer into the landscape rather than leaving them outside it. The forest around the couple is nearly black, the sky behind still holding a pale glow. The uprooted tree leans across the path, its bare roots and branches sharp against the light.