El verano (Paisaje con pareja)

In 1807 Caspar David Friedrich, then in his early thirties in Dresden, was only just turning from drawing in sepia to painting in oil, and this is among his first attempts in the medium. He conceived it as one of a pair, summer and autumn, part of a lifelong habit of tying the seasons to the ages of a person's life. Summer here is youth: a couple half-hidden among roses in the warm Elbe valley, a dovecote nearby, distant hills soft in the heat. The Prussian and Saxon lands around him had been overrun by Napoleon's armies only the year before, yet none of that reaches the picture. What stays with you is the pair in the foreground, wrapped in the roses, barely there unless you go looking for them.