Deux hommes au bord de la mer

Caspar David Friedrich showed this in Dresden in 1817, two years after the Napoleonic wars ended. Two men stand on an empty shore at dusk, watching the moon rise over the sea, and both wear the so-called Old German dress, a plain, archaic costume that young patriots had adopted as a quiet badge of a hoped-for united Germany. Worn in Friedrich's own circle, it carried a political charge, and within a few years the authorities would frown on it as a mark of dangerous liberalism. He set the figures small against a wide, cooling sky and gave them no faces, only the shared act of looking. A single sail sits far out on the water, barely catching the last light.