El Watzmann

Friedrich painted this towering Alpine peak between 1824 and 1825, and the strange thing is that he never once saw the Alps. He worked from a watercolour made by one of his students who had actually stood below the Watzmann, and stitched it together with rock studies from his own hikes in the lower Harz and Giant Mountains far to the north. So the mountain is real, but the view is assembled, built up from cold bare rock in the foreground to the bright snow summit that seems to float clear of the earth. It hangs today in Berlin, and its path there runs through a darker chapter. In 1937 a Jewish collector named Martin Brunn, forced out of Germany by the Nazi race laws, sold it to the gallery for 25,000 reichsmarks to pay for his family's escape to America.