Brume

This is one of Friedrich's quiet things, a small study of mist over water, a boat and a low shore barely holding their shape in the grey. He painted it around 1818, in his Dresden years, when he was working through every mood weather could put on a coast. Its strangest chapter came much later. In 1994 it was on loan to a show in Frankfurt when thieves shut themselves inside overnight and took it, along with two Turners lent by the Tate in London. It was gone for nearly a decade. A lawyer finally negotiated its return in 2003, and the small foggy panel came back to Hamburg.