Friedrich's The Abbey in the Oakwood (1809-10): The Monk's Dark Companion
Caspar David Friedrich painted The Abbey in the Oakwood (Abtei im Eichwald) in his Dresden studio in 1809 and 1810, at the same time as The Monk by the Sea. The two canvases are almost the same size, about one hundred and ten by one hundred and seventy centimetres, and Friedrich meant them to be seen together. The Monk is all space and light. The Abbey is all ruin and dusk: a broken Gothic church in the snow, bare oak trees, a graveyard, and a small procession of monks carrying a coffin toward the doorway of the ruin.
Two paintings, one exhibition
Friedrich sent both pictures to the Berlin Academy exhibition in the autumn of 1810. The fifteen-year-old Crown Prince of Prussia, the future King Frederick William IV, asked his father to buy them, and both entered the royal collection. They have stayed together ever since.
The pairing matters because each painting changes how the other reads. The Monk shows a living man alone before an empty sea and sky. The Abbey shows a burial: the end of a life, the end of a building, the end of a day. Many readers have taken the two as a sequence, first the monk's solitary contemplation and then his funeral. Friedrich left no written programme to confirm it.
What is in the picture
The lower half of the canvas is dark. Snow lies on the ground among crosses and old gravestones, and a freshly dug grave opens in the foreground. The monks, barely visible in the gloom, move slowly toward the ruined portal with the coffin between them. Around them stand leafless oaks, their branches twisted against the sky.
Above the ruin the light changes. A pale band of evening sky rises into deeper colour, and the broken wall of the church stands up into it, black and flat, like a cut-out.
The ruin comes from Eldena Abbey, a medieval Cistercian monastery near Greifswald on the Baltic coast, where Friedrich was born. He drew it many times from his youth onward. In the painting he lifted it out of its real surroundings and set it among oaks. The scene is a composition, not a view.
Reading the symbols
Friedrich's contemporaries read his landscapes as religious statements, and the Abbey invites it. The oak was a symbol of endurance and, in German writing of the time, of the old German past. The Gothic church stood for German Christian tradition. Here both are failing: the oaks are bare, the church is a shell.
The date gives the image a second meaning. In 1810 the German lands lay under French domination after Napoleon's victories of 1806. A ruined German church, a burial and a forest of dead oaks could be seen as a nation in mourning. Friedrich was a patriot who would later paint openly anti-French pictures, but he rarely explained his work. Both readings, the spiritual and the political, have been made since the nineteenth century, and the painting holds both.
Forgotten, then found again
After Friedrich's death in 1840 his reputation faded, and for decades his work was hardly shown. The great exhibition of German art held in Berlin in 1906 brought him back into view, and twentieth-century painters found in him a forerunner of their own bare, silent pictures.
Read The Abbey in the Oakwood beside The Monk by the Sea and the pair makes one argument: a man before the infinite, then the same kind of man returned to the earth. Friedrich gave no title to that argument. He only asked that the pictures be seen together.
Browse Friedrich and Romantic landscape prints in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.
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