Two Men Contemplating the Moon

When it was painted

When he painted this picture in the late 1820s, Friedrich was past fifty. Born in Greifswald, near the Baltic Sea, he had lived in Dresden for close to thirty years. He did not marry until 1818, when he was forty-three, and three children were born in the 1820s.

His fellow painter Georg Friedrich Kersting painted him at work in his studio. The room in that picture is almost empty: a window, an easel, a few tools, and little else. Friedrich drew trees and rocks carefully in pencil outdoors, then rebuilt his landscapes in that quiet room. Again and again he placed figures with their backs to us inside them.

He first painted this scene around 1819–20, and that version is now in Dresden. Another picture shows a man and a woman watching the moon in a similar forest. The Metropolitan Museum describes its painting as the third version of this famous composition. The two men are often identified as Friedrich himself and his student August Heinrich, who died young in 1822.

Their clothes are worth a second look. The loose cloaks and soft caps were what Germans then called old German dress. After 1819 that outfit was treated as a badge of the patriotic student movement the authorities were trying to suppress.

From the late 1820s his work steadily fell out of fashion. After a stroke in 1835 he could hardly paint in oils on any scale, and he died in Dresden in 1840. Largely forgotten for decades, he was rediscovered in the early twentieth century. This painting entered the Met in 2000.

Now look at the bottom of the picture. Below the two men, a pale dirt path climbs the slope at an angle. Follow it up, and you end up standing just behind them, where the moon comes into view.