海上月出

In 1822 a Berlin banker named Joachim Wagener asked Caspar David Friedrich for a pair of pictures to hang together, one for the morning and one for the evening. This is the evening one. Three young people in ordinary modern clothes sit on a low rock at the water's edge, their backs to us, watching the moon come up over the sea as two sailing ships glide in toward the shore. Friedrich almost never let the people in his paintings face us. He turns them away so that we watch what they watch. For him those returning ships carried an old, quiet meaning, a life's voyage nearing its harbor as the day ends. The morning painting made to hang beside it shows the opposite hour, a single tree standing in a wide meadow at first light.