“There is almost nothing to see!” That might well be a first reaction upon viewing Friedrich’s painting Ploughed Field. (1) And one might indeed ask what can be discovered here at all. The few elements are quickly listed: a roughly plowed field, known as a Sturzacker in German, pushes its way diagonally into the painting and at its upper end is lined by a narrow strip of meadow. Between the field and the meadow is a slender, slightly brighter stripe lined with single stones. A hiker with a walking stick is barely visible at the back of the meadow in the darkness of evening. His path seems to be leading toward a village that is merely suggested by a few roofs a bit lower down in the valley. The edge of the hill is lined by a series of larger and smaller trees, including what is presumably an aspen on the left, a weeping birch on the right, and, in the center, standing somewhat further back, a row of other deciduous trees. The trees adopt the slight diagonal of the meadow.

Probably the most striking element in the painting, however, is the setting evening sun, which lights up once again on the horizon behind a mountain chair and bathes the already twilit scene in its yellowish-golden light. The bands of clouds, which, typically of Friedrich, are extremely finely chiseled and mostly organized horizontally, alternate with these yellowish-golden portions of the sky in several layers.

This overall harmonious effect is further emphasized by the rich, coloristic palette. The complementary colors of yellow and violet are combined with and supplemented by another complementary contrast of blue and orange. As is so often the case in Friedrich’s work, the colors in between are extremely finely nuanced and mixed into the dark coloration of the imminently breaking night so that here, too, the experience of viewing the painting is characterized by calm and harmony.

Earlier interpretations of this painting, which has been little mentioned in the literature on Friedrich in general, see the man returning to the village as a “motif of returning or homecoming as a parable for death.” (2) Even without following this eschatological reading strictly, however, we can agree that Friedrich has painted a landscape of calm, limited to just a few pictorial elements, whose composition could almost be called meditative and is quite typical of his late paintings in particular.

Kilian Heck, in: exh. cat. Hamburg 2023, p. 266.

(1) Börsch-Supan/Jähnig 1973, p. 425, no. 390.
(2) Ibid.