There is something almost immaterial about the light blue mountain range that traverses this painting of a Bohemian landscape. (1) The distant mountains appear to withdraw from the viewer behind the morning haze. A vast sky vaults over the low horizon in a blue that slowly becomes more intense as it rises upward. Not a single cloud punctuates the uniformity. The color gradient is the main event in the painting, to which the actual landscape at the lower edge of the canvas seems to be subordinated almost as a marginal note, and where the narrative pictorial components gather in the middle. A strongly foreshortened path runs from the lower edge into the pictorial space; it disappears behind a gentle hummock only to briefly become visible again. The path, which can also be interpreted as the path through life, (2) leads on to a group of trees whose branches intertwine above it in an intimate connectedness.

Friedrich drew these trees in 1806 while visiting his sister in Breesen. (3) Immediately afterwards, he used one of the groups of trees he had captured on paper at the time for a sepia drawing (4) in which the trees arch over a cross. In other works, two trees standing close together serve as the expression of the love between a couple resting below the shade they provide. (5) These examples show how much the motif of trees in this form can be bound to the emotional subject matter of love and of faith in Friedrich’s oeuvre. A house is added to Bohemian Landscape with Milešovka Mountain from whose chimney smoke rises. In the landscape, the theme of the love and affection between two people is evidently carried on in two mountains that are arranged symmetrically to an axis, where the house is also located. The one at the right has been identified as Mount Milleschauer (Milešovka), the one at the left is the neighboring Mount Kletschen (Kletečna), two prominent mountains in the Central Bohemian Uplands. If one compares the painting with a drawing that Friedrich made in 1807 during a walking tour to the Central Bohemian Uplands, it becomes evident how much he harmonized the peaks in terms of their size and form and kept the mountains parallel with the edge of the painting, so that the overall composition assumes a strict form. (6) One can only speculate as to whether the two corresponding mountain peaks were the deciding reason why the painting, along with its counterpart Bohemian Landscape (7) in the evening light, was bought in 1808 by Franz Anton, Count of Thun-Hohenstein, and his bride Theresia, Countess of Brühl, for their castle in Tetschen (Děčin). With its serene atmosphere, it was interpreted as a wedding painting. (8)

Holger Birkholz, in: exh. cat. Hamburg 2023, p. 130.

(1) Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, pp. 313 f., no. 188.
(2) Ibid., p. 313.
(3) Caspar David Friedrich, Studies of Groups of Trees, May 24/26, 1806, Grummt 2011, vol. 1, p. 462, no. 492; Richter 2021–22, vol. 1, pp. 185 f.
(4) Coastal Landscape with Cross and Statue, 1806–07, pen in sepia, washed, pencil, 40.7 × 58 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Grummt 2011, vol. 1, pp. 477 f., no. 506.
(5) Summer–Midday–Youth, ca. 1803, pen in sepia, pencil, 19.5 x 27.5 cm, whereabouts unknown, Grummt 2011, vol. 1 pp. 366 f., no. 366, and Summer (sheet 3 of the series Ages of Man), ca. 1826, brush in sepia over pencil, 19 × 27.1 cm, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, pp. 402 f., no. 340; Grummt 2011, vol. 2, pp. 808 f., no. 894.
(6) See Grummt 2011, vol. 1, pp. 493 f., no. 527; see Hoch 1987a, pp. 100 f.