This painting, which has become famous under the title Easter Morning, has an unusually large number of figures for Friedrich: at least eight women are in groups of two or three on a road leading through a twilit landscape. (1) Nature is still bare, but the first shoots in the trees reveal the arrival of spring. The lattice-like density of the tree branches on the left and right edges clearly emphasizes the boundaries between the fore-, middle-, and background, suggesting that the motif of the path could be associated with a passage in a metaphorical sense. Although the women’s clothing unmistakably identifies them as contemporaries of the painter, in combination with the traditional title of the picture the group of three crossing the threshold from the foreground to the depths of the landscape is striking. They might recall the three women from the biblical story of Easter, who were the first to see the empty tomb of Christ (Mark 16:1–8). This evokes thoughts of the Christian celebration of Easter, but the image also retains an indeterminacy that invites further viewing and reflection.

This painting is one of a series of works for which drawings of figures have survived, which are not necessarily preparatory studies but could also have been made as tracings of its underdrawing or after the painting was finished. (2) It has been suggested that Friedrich made several of these sheets to assemble a repertoire of staffage figures for possible later use. The drawing in Dresden shows not only the three women of the foreground at the bottom right but also the smaller, more remote figures, whose scale and position in relation to the three women in front are reproduced in the drawing in correspondence with the proportions and distances in the painting.

It has not been decisively clarified whether Easter Morning was conceived as a pendant to the Hamburg painting Early Snow. Wilhelm Wegener, to whose collection the two pictures in the same format belonged in the mid-nineteenth century, explicitly described them as a pair that belonged together. (3) Helmut Börsch-Supan dates the winter painting in Hamburg considerably earlier, however; he points out that – unlike Easter Morning – it was in the Berlin collection of Georg Andreas Reimer until 1842 and therefore considers it a pendant of Pine Forest with a Waterfall. (4) However, the formats of Early Snow and Easter Morning are closer, and the two paintings would correspond very well with their paths leading into the landscape.

Johannes Grave, in: exh. cat. Hamburg 2023, p. 290.

(1) On the painting, see Sumowski 1970, pp. 129 and 242, no. 463; Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, p. 435, no. 408; Koerner 1998, p. 180; Vaughan 2004, pp. 281; Börsch-Supan 2008, pp. 152 f. and 188 f.; Grummt 2011, vol. 2, pp. 853 f., no. 941.
(2) See Geismeier 1965; Timm 2004, esp. p. 104; Grummt 2011, vol. 2, pp. 768 and 806; and Mösl 2021, pp. 113–17.
(3) See Wegener 1859, esp. p. 76.
(4) See Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, pp. 412–14, no. 363; and Zimmermann 2000, pp. 251–53.