Italy was a destination of longing for many artists in the nineteenth century. Caspar David Friedrich, by contrast, felt drawn to landscapes north of the Alps. He took several trips to the Baltic Sea, to Saxon Switzerland, the Harz Mountains, the Giant Mountains (Krkonoše), and to Bohemia; as documented by his numerous coastal and mountain landscapes.

In this forest landscape in the mountains, the wonderfully radiant blue of the night sky strikes the dominant note. A white full moon standing behind filigreed pine trees sheds light on the mountain slopes that right to the left and right, which have been cleared of trees. The moonlight illuminating the landscape does not reach the foreground, which lies in shadow. There, in front of a cave, a man and a woman have found refuge and lit a warming fire on which they are preparing a meal. The mountain slopes and hills with the cave, the human couple, and the fire can be interpreted as references to the hardship and transience of earthly existence. By contrast, the forest of slender pines rising behind it has an almost immaterial quality that seems like a space of rapture that finds heightened expression in the intensely luminous blue of the night sky and makes the immeasurability of the universe palpable.

This work from the collection of the Berlin publisher and art collector Georg Andreas Reimer had been unknown to scholars until it appeared on the art market in 1992, when it was acquired for the Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

Birgit Verwiebe, in: exh. cat. Hamburg 2023, p. 286.