Paysage d'hiver

Caspar David Friedrich painted this around 1811, and it belongs with a companion picture now in London. Read together, the two trace a movement from despair toward faith, the quiet religious meaning Friedrich liked to fold into a real northern-German winter. This is the darker half. A small figure leans on a crutch in a wide field of snow, a few bare stumps around him, a low grey-black sky pressing down. In the London pendant the same kind of wanderer has cast his crutches aside to pray before a crucifix among fir trees, a Gothic cathedral rising in the mist behind. Here there is no crucifix yet, only the snow and the long grey light.