Campo arato

By about 1830 Friedrich was 56 and slipping out of fashion in Dresden. Buyers wanted friendly genre scenes, his prices had dropped, and friends were quietly arranging support for him. He worked small in those years, and this is small, under 50 centimetres across. A field turned over after the harvest cuts diagonally through it, rough clods with a thin band of meadow above and a line of loose stones between them. A walker with a stick is barely visible in the evening dark at the far edge of the meadow, and a few rooftops down in the valley say where he is heading. Friedrich died in 1840 and then dropped out of sight for two generations. The Hamburger Kunsthalle bought this field in 1905, a year before the Berlin exhibition of a century of German art at which he was rediscovered.