Caspar David Friedrich: figures contemplating the Moon
Caspar David Friedrich's Two Men Contemplating the Moon: the versions of the painting, the figure seen from behind, nature's symbols and the political context.
Two figures standing still on a mountain path, seen from behind, watch a thin sickle Moon rising in the twilight sky. The painting Two Men Contemplating the Moon, made by Caspar David Friedrich around 1819-1820 and now kept in Dresden, in the Galerie Neue Meister, has become one of the emblematic images of German Romanticism. In a few dozen centimetres it condenses the relationship between humankind, nature and the infinite that runs through all the painter's work.
The painter of contemplation
Friedrich was born in 1774 in Greifswald, on the Baltic, then in Swedish Pomerania, studied at the Copenhagen Academy and settled in Dresden, where he lived until his death in 1840. His landscapes are not topographical views: mountains, coasts, forests and skies are recomposed in the studio, from drawings made from life, to become images for meditation. Friedrich often chose the hours of transition, dawn, sunset, the moonlit night.
A characteristic element of his painting is the figure seen from behind, which German critics call the Rückenfigur. We know neither its face nor its expression: we can only put ourselves in its place and look at what it looks at. In Two Men the device reaches great intensity, because the viewer of the painting becomes the third participant in a silent recollection.
A scene full of symbols
The composition is built from a few elements: a rocky path, an uprooted, bare oak, an evergreen fir, the crescent Moon accompanied by a bright star. Many interpreters have read a symbolic language in it: the dead tree as a sign of transience, the fir as an image of Christian hope, the Moon as the promise of a light coming from beyond. Friedrich himself left no detailed explanations, and these readings remain hypotheses.
The two figures, an older man leaning on a stick and a younger one resting his hand on his shoulder, have sometimes been identified as the painter and his pupil August Heinrich. They wear the old German dress adopted by patriots and by students of the university associations and banned after the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819. According to an anecdote, Friedrich ironically remarked that the two figures were hatching demagogic intrigues.
The other versions and the legacy
Friedrich returned to the subject in other versions. In Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, a woman takes the place of the young man, while a later variant, held by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, repeats the composition with a man and a woman. Also in Berlin is Moonrise over the Sea, of 1822, with figures seated on a rock watching ships come home.
Forgotten for decades after his death, Friedrich was rediscovered at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Dresden painting has also had a singular literary fortune: according to testimony reported by the scholar Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett named it as one of the sources of Waiting for Godot, the play in which two characters wait, as the Moon rises, for someone who does not come.
In Friedrich's paintings the Moon does not light up a story or refer to a specific myth. It is a mute and distant presence, the vanishing point of gaze and thought. That is why his night scenes continue to speak to very different viewers: they offer an image of contemplation in which everyone can recognise their own questions before the sky.