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Caspar David Friedrich might well have experienced this himself – walking along a Baltic Sea beach in the evening, stopping to sit on a smooth rock and watching the breathtaking moonrise. After all, Friedrich did spend the first twenty years of his life in Greifswald, a town on the Baltic coast. When he left, he went to Copenhagen to study and later settled here in Dresden. Afterwards, he regularly returned to the Baltic to visit relatives and to paint.

But no matter how natural this scene may look, it was not just inspired by a personal memory. For a comparison, look at Salvator Rosa’s seventeenth-century painting Forest Landscape with Three Philosophers further to the right. It also has three figures on a prominent raised rock, rather like a pedestal, standing out from the landscape. Friedrich might well have adopted this motif from Rosa, since it is rather unusual in art history.

In Friedrich’s lifetime, Rosa’s landscape was already part of the Electoral and Royal Paintings Gallery. During his time in Dresden, Friedrich often visited the collection, renowned throughout Europe. In a letter to the King of Saxony, he even mentioned these “excellent art treasures” as one reason why he chose to come and live in Dresden. And as you’ll see on your tour, there are many echoes of Dresden’s Old Master paintings in Friedrich’s works.