Friedrich’s Trees and Bushes in Snow was shown publicly for the first time in 1828 on the occasion of the Leipzig Trade Fair. The Kunstblatt art journal commented: “This ingenious painter likes to surrender to the inclination to endow what seems subsumed in the customary contemplation of nature (…) with an independent meaning.”
In this work, Friedrich again shows himself to be an avant-garde artist. His fellow artists also went out into the countryside to sketch directly from nature. But facing a thicket of bare branches in the snow, most would have, at best, just made a quick sketch. Friedrich, though, turns this seemingly unprepossessing motif into a complete oil painting. You could almost say he painted the thicket’s portrait – as if it were a human face.
Friedrich is incredibly radical in formal terms too, dramatically reducing his composition to the trees and bushes, leaving no indication of the location at all. Moreover, with the background largely covered in fog, the scene has no real spatial depth, lending it an almost abstract quality.
Yet here too Friedrich has a political message. The snowy landscape symbolises society frozen in the years after Napoleon’s defeat and Germany’s return to a patchwork of kingdoms and principalities under autocratic rulers.
- Material & Technique
- Oil on canvas
- Museum
- Galerie Neue Meister
- Dating
- 1827/28
- Inventory number
- Gal.-Nr. 2197 G