Prati vicino a Greifswald

Friedrich was born in Greifswald in 1774, when the town and the rest of western Pomerania still belonged to Sweden. That ended in 1815, when the Napoleonic settlement handed the province to Prussia, and he painted this view of the meadows outside the town a few years later, in 1821 and 1822. The skyline is not invented. He worked from a drawing made around 1806, ruled with a grid so it could be copied onto canvas, and he kept the towers and the proportions of the town as they actually stood instead of shifting a church to improve the composition. The animals he did change. A cow in the drawing became a horse grazing at the right, and two more were added galloping across the meadow. Hamburg bought the painting in 1904.