The painting Evening on the Baltic Sea (1) is one of the few works by Friedrich in which people in the landscape can be seen from the front. It features two fishermen warming themselves by the fire in the gathering darkness. The cold light of the moon contrasts effectively with the warmth of the fire, which, according to a correspondent for the Wiener Zeitschrift, “serves only to make the darkness visible.” (2) Turned away from the moonlit sea stretching into the expanse, the fishermen, in front of a wall of suspended nets, focus completely on the small illuminated circle at their feet. They do not notice the symbolically exaggerated anchor at their side nor the silent gliding-by of the galleys, (3) and thus they seem to be entirely turned toward the here and now.

Among other things, for the painting Friedrich drew upon the drawings that he had made in 1818 on a trip with his newlywed wife Caroline to his native Baltic coast. In two of them, a fisherman can be seen wearing traditional Mönchgut attire: (4) on one sheet with his hands in his pockets; lighting his pipe on the other. (5) In the painting, Friedrich brought these two images of the same man together and placed them side by side as if they were two fishermen. In the catalogue accompanying the Friedrich exhibition in Hamburg in 1974, Siegmar Holsten compares Friedrich’s painting with Claude-Joseph Vernet’s La nuit; un port de mer au clair de lune from 1771 (6) for the purpose of illustrating Friedrich’s “dependence on a work from the eighteenth century.” (7) However, where Vernet used ships, moonlight, and fire in order to distribute them arrestingly on the pictorial plane in keeping with the variation in his work, Friedrich concentrated the same motifs in the center of the painting to lend more space to the calm surrounding them. They rest near the apex of the clearly recognizable hyperbola, (8) which floats through them with enormous casualness, as if it wanted to only just touch the earth in them. In the composition of his work, Friedrich repeatedly returned to designing cloud formations and gradations of light in the sky as an arc that declines to the center of the painting almost as an isosceles, while in the landscape he responds with perspectival foreshortenings that likewise constitute an arc – one, however, that rises inverted to the center of the painting. Both arcs approach one another at the horizon line, which is relatively low and inspired by Dutch landscape painting. The compositional scheme conveys the impression of a landscape opening itself up boundlessly to the sides.

Holger Birkholz, in: exh. cat. Hamburg 2023, p. 224

(1) Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, p. 425, no. 391.
(2) Anonymous 1831; also quoted in Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, p. 116.
(3) Cibura 2019, p. 265, no. 1397.
(4) Ibid., p. 32.
(5) Grummt 2011, vol. 2, pp. 754 f., nos. 825 and 826.
(6) Oil on canvas, 98 × 164 cm, Musee du Louvre, Paris.
(7) Exh. cat. Hamburg 1974, p. 34.
(8) On the hyperbolic pattern in Friedrich’s work, see Wolfradt 1924, pp. 125 f.; Busch 2003, pp. 78 and 123.