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The standard landscape painting is rectangular, while a vertical format is commonly used for portraits. In his Oak Tree in the Snow, Friedrich couldn’t care less about such conventions – which is a statement in itself. Here, in essence, he painted a portrait of the oak tree in the title, seeking to capture its individual character as precisely as possibly. With the same meticulousness a portrait painter renders a face’s lines and complexion, Friedrich reproduces the texture of the bark and the complex network of boughs and branches.

In this approach, he decisively distances himself from his predecessors among the Dresden landscape painters. These included, for instance, Adrian Zingg, a generation older than Friedrich, who worked out a system intended to enable artists to easily reproduce different types of trees. The most efficient method, he suggested, was to focus on foliage and the particular contour lines of the leaves.

In contrast, Friedrich’s Oak Tree in the Snow and his other portraits of trees are based on precise drawings of individual trees in nature. Comparing the drawings with the corresponding paintings, one sees just how precisely he transferred his sketches to much larger canvases. He even reproduced the tiniest details to scale. Such precision would be almost impossible freehand. However, optical devices already existed to project images onto to a canvas – so art historians assume this is what he used.