Pairs of paintings, usually identical in format and made at the same time, play a special role in Caspar David Friedrich’s oeuvre. The painter was offering different perspectives. On the one hand, he produced antithetical pairs of opposites. On the other, he created pairs or cycles of paintings to depict temporal sequences, such as times of day, seasons, or phases of life.

The Berlin banker Joachim Heinrich Wilhelm Wagener, whose art collection would become the foundation of the city’s Nationalgalerie, commissioned a pair of paintings from Friedrich: a morning landscape and an evening one. On November 1, 1822, the artist reported in a letter to his patron that the two works were completed. (1) The image of morning was the painting The Solitary Tree. (2) In it the broad plane of a meadow landscape stretches to the edge of a mountain range. In the middle of the foreground, an oak looms monumentally; beneath it a shepherd lingers with his herd.

As the image of evening, Friedrich painted Moonrise by the Sea. (3) On the dark surface of the water, silvery reflections of the night stars glimmer. The disk of the full moon is half-hidden behind the banks of clouds above the horizon, its light seeming to break out from a gate of clouds. Two women and a man have sat down on the rocks by the bank and are looking at the moon, over the sea, into the seemingly limitless distance, toward the two sailboats. The dark silhouettes of the latter lend a rhythm to the planes of light of the sea and sky. As Kristina Mösl has shown in her dissertation, (4) to execute these figures Friedrich used contour drawings on transfer paper for the underdrawing of the painting – a method he would employ for other paintings as well.

This painting radiates a consoling atmosphere, conveyed by three figures in company together and the ships returning home. At the same time, the expanse of the sky and horizon makes the immeasurability of the universe palpable. In the painting of morning, The Solitary Tree, a turn to worldly life dominates, whereas in the painting of evening the drama of nature, with the otherworldly beauty of the moon as a sign of hope, evokes desires and leads thoughts into presentiments.

Birgit Verwiebe, in: exh. cat. Hamburg 2023, p. 208.

(1) Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zentralarchiv, Nachlass Wagener, Künstlerbriefe, SMB-ZA, IV/NL Wagener 23.
(2) 1822, oil on canvas, 55 × 71 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie; Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, p. 378, no. 298.
(3) Ibid., p. 379, no. 299.
(4) Mösl 2021, digital appendix, pp. 854–58.