Ravin rocheux dans les montagnes de grès de l'Elbe

The sandstone country upriver from Dresden picked up its nickname from two Swiss artists working in the city in the 1700s, Adrian Zingg and Anton Graff, who said the rocks reminded them of home. By the 1820s Saxon Switzerland had guidebooks and a steady traffic of walkers out from Dresden, and Friedrich had been going there for decades, drawing single rocks, roots and dead trees in pencil and dating every sheet. He was 48 when he made this, and taste in Dresden had begun to move away from him. His pictures sold less easily than they had ten years earlier, and he went on working exactly as before. He never painted in front of the motif. A ravine like this one was assembled in a bare studio out of those old sheets, every rock in it drawn from something he had stood in front of, the gorge as a whole from none.