Marinha ao luar

Leipzig in the 1820s was a trade-fair city with money in it, and one of the men with money was Maximilian Speck von Sternburg, a wool merchant who collected seriously enough to build a picture gallery on his estate at Lützschena outside the town. This small seascape, about 25 by 31 centimetres, belongs to that collection, which came to the Museum der bildenden Künste as a foundation and is catalogued there as G 1732. Friedrich painted it in Dresden around 1827, at a point when private collectors of Speck's kind were most of the market he had left. He put a single sailing ship in the strip of light the moon lays across the water, and gave the whole lower half of the canvas to dark sea.