月光下的北海

This is a small painting, about 22 by 31 centimetres, and Friedrich made it in 1823 or 1824, just as his footing in Dresden was slipping. The Academy's chair of landscape painting fell vacant in 1824 and went elsewhere. Friedrich was given an associate professorship with no class of his own, while younger painters were turning to brighter, more descriptive landscape and buyers were following them. Almost the entire surface here is cloud, moonlight and water, with the shipping small and low against it. He had known that coastline since boyhood in Greifswald, and moonlit water kept coming back in his pictures to the end of his working life.