Montagnes dans la brume montante

By the time Friedrich painted this he had fallen out of fashion. Through the 1830s German taste had moved on from his solemn Romantic landscapes, patrons had drifted away, and a stroke in 1835 left him weak and struggling to work in oils. This is one of his last paintings. The motif is the Rosenberg, a hill in what is now the Czech-German borderland that he had walked years earlier, seen past a nearer ridge as fog lifts off the valley. Friedrich rarely painted a place exactly as it stood; he assembled his landscapes from remembered fragments to make you feel the stillness rather than the geography. The far summit sits at a deliberate remove, beyond a band of mist, just out of reach.