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In the last phase of his life, after a stroke preventing him from painting, Caspar David Friedrich returned to the island of Rügen – at least, in his mind. He revisited the landscape drawings he made there as a young man, and also went back to the technique of sepia painting, his favourite medium in his youth. The yellowy-brown sepia ink could be layered particularly well to create fine nuances in the tonal contrasts between light and shade – a technique Friedrich brilliantly mastered to create atmospheric light conditions and subtle tints in the sky. The early sketch he took for this picture shows Rügen’s Königsstuhl chalk cliff. Here, though, Friedrich left out the cliff to create an empty landscape with an open horizon, and added the magical moment of the transition from day to night.

After Friedrich’s death, this work was acquired from his widow for the Dresden print collection. In the accession register, it is listed as Stony Beach with Setting Sun. Later, the title was crossed out and the setting sun became a rising moon, a change repeated several times. Even investigating the location itself did not resolve the issue. Instead, it showed that from this point on Rügen’s coastline you can see neither the sun nor the moon rising and setting. So it seems that Caspar David Friedrich imagined the heavenly body in his studio – but did he really think of a moonrise? Or was it actually a sunset? What would you write in the acquisitions register?