Friedrich’s biography is intertwined in various ways with the city of Neubrandenburg, located around sixty kilometers south of Greifswald. Not only was it the native city of his parents, but his siblings Johann Samuel and Catharina Dorothea also lived there. That took the artist often to the city, on which he also reflected in his art. For example, around 1816 he painted a picture in which its cityscape was transferred to mountainous surroundings. (1) In this late work, Friedrich returned to this motif again under different circumstances. The unfinished painting, much of which does not go beyond underdrawing and underpainting, (2) now shows the silhouette of the city in flames, with sunrays in the background. Whereas in his earlier views of Greifswald Friedrich had already dedicated himself to this pictorial type of the city embedded in a landscape, depicting it at different times of day, his late painting of Neubrandenburg reveals the, in equal measure, disturbing and visionary character of his art. Nothing is known of a fire in the city during his lifetime, but Friedrich may have been alluding to any of the historically documented blazes of 1631, 1676, and 1737. (3)

The painting shows a view of the city from the northeast. A road leads past harvested fields to the Friedlander Tor, which was built in the fourteenth century. This multipart structure in the northern German brick Gothic style was an integral component of the city walls of Neubrandenburg. The silhouette of the city is dominated by the towering Marienkirche, which is also already in flames, as is clear from the clouds of smoke emerging from the roof and spire. With regard to the architectonic look of the tower, Friedrich took the liberty of adding another floor and transforming the Baroque termination into a Gothic one. (4)

For the layout of the foreground and middle ground, the artist had recoursed to a drawing from 1824, of what is presumably of a motif from the area around Dresden. In the painting, he replaced the mountain ranges in the background of the drawing with the cityscape of Neubrandenburg. (5)

Above the smoke-filled area of the painting, there is a cloudbank that takes up the full width of the composition, above which the sky gradually clears up. Though hidden from our view, the sun is rising, and its bundle of yellow rays fans out segment-like and then, further up, transitions in the cold, bright blue of the sky. The catastrophe and the unalterable rhythm of nature thus, oddly, coalesce.

Markus Bertsch, in: exh. cat. Hamburg 2023, p. 276.

(1) Neubrandenburg, ca. 1816, oil on canvas, 91 × 72 cm, Pommersches Landesmuseum Greifswald; Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, pp. 338 f., no. 225.
(2) Ibid., pp. 448 f., no. 427 (under the title Sonnenaufgang bei Neubrandenburg [Sunrise near Neubrandenburg]).
(3) Exh. cat. Hamburg 1974, p. 296.
(4) Ibid., pp. 296 f.; exh. cat. Hamburg 2018, p. 274.
(5) Grummt 2011, vol. 2, pp. 782 f., no. 857. See Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, p. 448, under no. 427.