Although Friedrich hiked in the Giant Mountains (or Krkonoše) only once in his life, the experiences of this journey were to find expression in his paintings even years later. In July 1810, he set off on foot from Dresden with his friend the painter Georg Friedrich Kersting, who was eleven years younger. Their route took them over the Zittau and Jizera Mountains across the ridge of the Giant Mountains to its highest peak, the Schneekoppe (Sněžka). Friedrich recorded his impressions in numerous sketches and drawings. He devoted himself to close-up detailed studies of trees and boulders as well as to the ridges of distant mountain ranges, executed in pencil, brush, and watercolors.

The first painting, produced soon after returning, was the important, large-format work Morning in the Giant Mountains (1810–11), in which numerous mountain ridges extend infinitely into the depths like crests of waves on the sea. (1)

Around two decades later, between 1830 and 1835, he painted a landscape dominated by intense evening light: The Giant Mountains. (2) Friedrich had prepared for the composition with a squared, precisely executed pen drawing. (3) According to Christina Grummt, this drawing may have been made after climbing the Schneekoppe the evening of July 11, 1810. (4) It shows the view from the Wiesenbaude situated on the Koppenplan below the Schneekoppe, looking to the southwest over the Ziegenrücken (Kozi hřbety) toward Jeschken (Ještěd), the tallest mountain in northern Bohemia.

In the haze of sunset, the mountain ranges are staggered into rising and falling layers as far as the horizon. Evening fog rises from the valleys; as the distance increases, the articulated colored stripes of the mountain ridges fade into a pale gray in which the materiality of the distant peaks ultimately seems to dissolve. Vaulted above them the evening sky glows between orange and yellow. A suggestive tension arises from the juxtaposition of the close-up rock structures in the foreground and the remote expanse of the seemingly boundless natural space. While the initial impression is one of complete solitude, on closer inspection the figure of a wanderer can be seen leaning on a rock, perhaps an allusion to his traveling companion Kersting.

Around 1823, Friedrich had chosen the same prospect for the background of his painting Morning in the Mountains. (5)

Birgit Verwiebe, in: exh. cat. Hamburg 2023, p. 288.

(1) Oil on canvas, 108 × 170 cm, Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg; Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, pp. 315 f., no. 190.
(2) Ibid., pp. 440, no. 414.
(3) Giant Mountain Landscape, ca. 1810, pen in black and brown, wash, squared, 20 × 31 cm, whereabouts unknown; Grummt 2011, vol. 2, pp. 614 f., no. 634.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Oil on canvas, 135 × 170 cm, State Hermitage, St. Petersburg; Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, p. 379, no. 300.