The Riesengebirge

For Friedrich, the liberation of his country presaged a period of happy stability, in which he was elected to the Dresden Academy in 1816 and married two years later. The removal of the stimulus of patriotic resistance rather diminished Friedrich’s symbolic rigour. He developed a broader handling of paint, and made a number of studies of clouds and natural phenomena. The change of interpretation and technique can be clearly seen in this painting.

With his friend Kersting he had made a tour of the mountainous area near Dresden known as ‘Saxon Switzerland’, in the summer of 1810. Morning in the Riesengebirge, painted shortly afterwards, is another exposition of his theme of the cross on a peak. In this later picture of the early 1830s, Friedrich recollected his mountain tour in terms of pure landscape, with only a shepherd to inhabit it; the zones of earth and heaven are harmonized by the melding vapour of morning mist.