Deep green is the defining color in this small-format painting; (1) the forest and the waterfall are its motifs. A boulder stands out. Bright and planar, its jagged form blocks our view into the depths and yet leads it straight there. Immovably wedged, the rock determines the course of the stream flowing from the back to the front toward the viewer. Rapids splash around the stones and gurgle into the foreground.

Stasis and movement are Friedrich’s central themes in this painting. They are presented as clear antitheses, and yet at the same time the ambiguity of this order is demonstrated. Moss and lichen conquer and change the boulders; grasses grow on the stones; flowers even bloom in yellow and orange. Life burgeons on the inhospitable stone. The painting has therefore been read as an “allegory of spring and a new beginning“ and hence as a pendant to the winter scene Early Snow. (2) At the same time, the fresh green of the moss cannot cover up the fact that the geometric form of the central stone, which tapers slightly toward the bottom, recalls a sarcophagus or a massive tomb stela. A withered branch, a motif used in various ways by Friedrich, looms in the foreground. (3) The stream, which was lively movements ago, stills here into a motionless flat surface because it has reached the pool.

This is also evoked by the style of the painting. The painter guided the brush in horizontal lines strictly parallel to the lower edge of the picture. The vertical lines correspond to this. A look into the depths of the forest reveals the rigor and clarity of nature behind its vitality. Between the fir branches fanning outward, the looming branches of the spruces are vertical, column-like, almost sacred.

Friedrich was thus interpreting the rectangular form and planarity of the painting. The colors also reinforce the impression of his reflecting on the pictorial means. For the water, the painter employed nearly all of the astonishingly multi-colored palette of the painting. The green of the vegetation is reflected, as is the reddish brown. This connects the body of water in the foreground with the forest floor that shines through in the background and thus acquires compositional significance. In an arc curving downward and another upward, it describes the form of a hyperbola and thus marks out three pictorial areas. Between the comparatively uniform zones of vertically organized trees and the horizontally structured body of water, the middle ground unfolds a dynamic of organic unpredictability.

The elements together produce the totality of nature. In Friedrich’s work, that always includes what which is not directly visible. Surprising, light, and even cheerful, a bright blue shines in the water. Turning around, one looks from the thicket of the forest into the expanse of the sky.

Like Early Snow, this painting was probably presented in the art exhibition of the Dresden Academy in 1828.4 For a time it was in the possession of Friedrich’s close friend, the Norwegian painter Johan Christian Dahl.

Katharina Hoins, in: exh. cat. Hamburg 2023, p. 178

(1) Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, p. 412, no. 362.

(2) Ibid., p. 412; Howoldt 2001, p. 40.

(3) In Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, p. 412, it is interpreted as a “memento mori.”

(4) Anonymous 1828a; Sumowski 1970, p. 221.