Village Landscape in Morning Light (The Lone Tree)

This painting seems fairly realistic at first sight. The composition is not the product of a single, specific visual impression, however, but is highly artificial, being composed of no less than six individual studies which Friedrich executed between 1806 and 1810. The landscape-format composition presents a plain extending without interruption into the background, seen as if the viewer were standing on the gentle rise which begins in the bottom left and right-hand corners. From here, our gaze falls upon a small pond - to which no path leads - and upon a huge oak tree, which looks at first sight to be fairly close by. Once our eyes have also registered the diminutive figure of a shepherd leaning against its trunk, however, the tree suddenly appears further away and hence gigantic. Aspects of proximity and distance are permanently chafing against each other throughout the painting, whereby rational everyday experience is thwarted by visual irrationality. While an idyll of unspoilt nature unfolds around the oak and the shepherd, the villages and church spires of the land developed by man are as it were concealed and compressed within a valley by the mountains and the sky high above. All this points to an overall symbolism in which the oak tree, monumentalized to the status of protagonist, is a metaphor for growth and decay or for human life in general.

The painting's identically-sized pendant, the Moonrise by the Sea, is also in the Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 5 minutes): Edvard Grieg: Peter Gynt Suite No 1, Op, 46 ('Morning Mood')