Paesaggio invernale

A man has thrown down his crutches and sits propped against a rock in the snow, praying at a small crucifix. Three fir trees stand over him, and out of the freezing mist behind rises the ghost of a Gothic cathedral, its spires deliberately echoing the shape of the trees. Friedrich painted this around 1811, and the whole thing is an argument you read rather than simply see. The sick man has left his crutches behind because faith, not the body, now carries him. For a long time the picture was lost. It surfaced in Paris in 1982, in the collection of an exiled Russian prince, and when London bought it in 1987 it became the first Friedrich to enter a British public collection.