Chaumière sous la neige

By 1827 Caspar David Friedrich's kind of solemn Romantic landscape was slipping out of fashion, and buyers were drifting toward brighter, more cheerful pictures. He kept painting winter. This small canvas shows a snowed-in cottage with its door standing open, a couple of bare willows, and a haystack, all under a heavy grey stillness. Friedrich had spent his life reading quiet weather as a mood, and here there is no figure at all, just that open door doing the work a lonely wanderer usually did in his paintings. He showed it at the Dresden Academy exhibition that same year, where Prince Johann Georg of Saxony bought it straight off the wall.