Treasures from German Museum - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 2019 - 145 Euro Cent

In 1822, Caspar David Friedrich, one of the most important German landscape painters of the Romantic period, created a time-of-day diptych known today as "The Lonely Tree" and "Moonrise on the Sea". In the picture of the morning, a green meadow landscape with ponds, groups of trees and villages stretches. At the end of the brightly lit plain rise gothic steeples of a city in front of towering dark mountains. At the center of the composition is a monumental oak that begins to die in the crown. A shepherd leans against her trunk while his sheep graze in the meadow. Many of Caspar David Friedrich's motifs are influenced by religious themes and fundamental interpretive patterns - including "The Lonely Tree". Different approaches to interpretation explain the oak to mediator between earth and sky or to the embodiment of life force and strength. In its counterpart "Moonrise at the Sea", the moon stands for supernatural beauty and timelessness. Since 1861 the two pictures have been part of the foundation collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.