On the verso of his drawing of the Amselfall near Rathen, Friedrich recorded with just a few modest strokes the silhouette of the Honigstein massif sometime in the first years of the nineteenth century. Having already had recourse to this study earlier while working on several pictorially worked-out drawings, (1) around 1808 he used it once more as the basis for conceiving his painting Morning Mist in the Mountains. (2) The oil painting is one of the early works that are surprising for their restriction to just a few motifs; it shows only the mountain with its characteristic rock formations at its peak. The reduction of objects in the painting is further heightened by how large sections are dominated by clouds and patches of mist, so that the mountain and the trees growing on it only stand out clearly and distinctly in places. Clouds and mist transition indistinguishably into the sky, especially on the edges of the picture.

In this way Friedrich captures a transitory phenomenon that is fundamentally connected to questions of visibility and concealment. Just as the morning mist will clear as time progresses, the mountain veiled in mist will also gradually gain contour as one views the painting. In that spirit, Friedrich’s painting invites the viewer to take time. One’s eye might then find the small cross on the peak, behind which the sky is clearing. For Friedrich, it was presumably not only about the moment when the viewer stumbles on the cross. While it can open up a new dimension of religious meaning, because of its small size the cross inevitably draws the eye closer into the painting, so that ultimately its two-dimensionality and materiality become obvious. Thus shift in attention from the object depicted to the means of depicting it continues the play of visibility and concealment that was already evident with the mist and clouds in the landscape.

Johannes Grave, in: exh. cat. Hamburg 2023, p. 153.

(1) See Grummt 2011, vol. 1, pp. 367 f., no. 367, and pp. 374 f., no. 378.
(2) On this painting, see Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, p. 300, no. 166; Hoch 1996, pp. 38 f.; Busch 2003, pp. 87 f.; Grave 2006, pp. 393–401; Grummt 2011, pp. 287–90, no. 292; Scholl 2016, pp. 308 f.; Neddens 2017, p. 698; Busch 2021, pp. 86–88; Richter 2021–22, vol. 1, p. 239; Grave 2023, p. 107.