Matin de Pâques

By 1828 Caspar David Friedrich was slipping out of fashion. Younger German painters wanted bright daylight and sharp detail, and his quiet, symbol-laden landscapes were starting to look old-fashioned to them. This small panel keeps doing what he had always done. Small groups of women walk a bare road at first light, the trees still leafless from winter but just beginning to bud. Friedrich sets the fading moon against the coming dawn, a pairing he often used to speak about death and the hope of something beyond it. The season carries the same idea, late winter turning toward spring, which he linked to the Resurrection that gives the picture its name. He painted it about seven years before a stroke would largely end his working life.