Abbey among Oak Trees

Abbey among Oak Trees is the companion piece to Monk by the Sea. Friedrich showed both paintings in the Berlin Academy Exhibition of 1810. At the request of the 15-year-old crown prince, they were bought by King Friedrich Wilhelm III. In their perplexing remoteness and formal radicalism they were to become key works in German Romanticism. In Monk by the Sea a human being stands lost in the apocalyptic loneliness and infinity of nature and the cosmos. He meditates on life and its boundaries. In the companion piece, the gates of death have opened. Monks carry a coffin into a deserted Gothic ruin to hold a requiem mass under the cross. The graveyard with its crooked, sunken tombstones is equally deserted. Bare oaks reach up into the sky as though in complaint. The first light of dawn is appearing over the horizon like an ocher-yellow veil, outshining the tender curve of the crescent moon. The visionary gleam of the heavenly realm is completely detached from the earthly regions, which are still sunk in darkness. One sign of hope is in the two single lights on the crucifix. For the painter Carl Gustav Carus, who was also a friend of Friedrich’s, this painting was “of all recent landscapes, possibly the most deeply poetic work of art.”