The painting shows not only the close bond between the two wanderers, who are admiring the evening moonlight in silent contemplation, but also documents a connection between two painters that was to last more than twenty years – Caspar David Friedrich and Johan Christian Dahl. Immediately after Dahl’s arrival in Dresden in September 1818, Friedrich, who had lived there since 1798, showed him the city; however, his behavior was initially rather reserved. (1) By December of that year, he had already become more familiar with him: Dahl reported that he “spent the entire morning conversing [with Friedrich] about art.“ (2) In 1820, the two artists exchanged paintings as an expression of their friendship. Dahl gave Friedrich the picture River in the Plauenscher Grund, (3) who in return gave Dahl the painting Two Men Contemplating the Moon. (4) Dahl kept it until Friedrich’s death in 1840 and then sold it to the Dresden Gemäldegalerie, writing that it deserved a “more worthy destiny.” (5) It was the museum’s first acquisition of a painting by Friedrich and has since been a permanent part of the collection’s presentation.

In his painting, Friedrich combines religious and political metaphors. The path runs as a journey through life between a leafless tree at the right and an evergreen at the left, which were interpreted as symbols of death and the promise of eternal life, respectively. The waxing moon in the center is to be understood as a symbol for Christ. (6) The two men’s so-called “Altdeutsche Tracht” or “old German costume” can be explained by the context of the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 and the subsequent persecution of those branded as demagogues which led to the ban on this kind of clothing as an expression of a liberal-revolutionary attitude directed against the Restoration. (7) The two themes combine in the image of the waxing moon as a symbol of Christ and salvation: the Christian becomes political, and vice versa, when striving for freedom is linked with the promise of salvation and political action based on Christianity. (8)

Holger Birkholz, in: exh. cat. Hamburg 2023, p. 202.

(1) Spitzer 2014, p. 34.
(2) Cited in ibid.
(3) 1820, oil on canvas, 55 × 79 cm, KODE Kunstmuseene, Bergen.
(4) Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, pp. 356 f., no. 261.
(5) Ibid., p. 356.
(6) Ibid.
(7) On this, see Schneider 2001, pp. 163 f.
(8) Märker 1974, p. 129.