El árbol solitario

A Berlin banker named Wagener commissioned this in 1822, as the morning half of a pair, its evening companion a moonrise over the sea. So this is meant to be first light in the German countryside, a shepherd and his flock gathered in a wide damp meadow with hills and a distant town beyond. At the center stands a single old oak, and Friedrich has not painted it as a picture of health. Its lower branches still carry leaves, but the whole crown above is dead and bare, the trunk broken off so that what is left reads faintly like a cross. Friedrich, who lived in a Germany newly occupied and then reshaped by the Napoleonic wars, kept returning to that image of something battered but still upright. Wagener later gave the painting to found the Berlin national collection, which is why it hangs here.