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In Caspar David Friedrich’s oeuvre, many of his paintings tend to have a melancholy mood. Here, though, we find an exceptionally cheerful spring landscape in the glow of the early morning light. The landscape is the Central Bohemian Uplands, just 50 kilometres to the south of Dresden. From the foreground's rich green sloping meadow, a path leads though a group of trees, meticulously painted. In the valley beyond, a house is hidden between other trees and shrubs. Only the smoke rising from the chimney tells us the house is inhabited. The landscape is devoid of human figures. In the underdrawing, Friedrich originally included a wanderer, but left out the figure when he painted the landscape. The two peaks rising majestically in the background are, on the right, the Milešovka – or Milleschauer in German – and the Kletečná to the left.

Yet the real protagonist in this work is not the magnificent landscape; it is the cloudless sky covering nearly two thirds of the canvas. For Friedrich’s contemporary audience, the emptiness of this large surface solely devoted to the most subtle colour transitions was quite a challenge.

Further to the left, a second landscape of a similar size also shows the Central Bohemian Uplands, though the light is different. Friedrich was fascinated by the diverse atmospheric moods in landscapes, and he painted them in different variations.

In early August 1808, Franz Anton, Count of Thun and Hohenstein, bought the Bohemian landscape with the Milešovka. He put it in his palace in Tetschen – today’s Děčín – close to the countryside in the painting. Since the Count married just over a month later, perhaps the painting was a wedding gift – and that would fit with the image of two peaks of the same height set more or less symmetrically.