Friedrich's Two Men Contemplating the Moon: The 1819 Painting That Beckett Used as the Visual Model for Waiting for Godot
Updated: Sep 4
Caspar David Friedrich painted Two Men Contemplating the Moon in his Dresden studio in the autumn of 1819. The canvas is small — thirty-five by forty-four centimetres, oil on panel — and shows two cloaked figures from behind, standing close together on a rough forest path, looking up at a thin crescent moon rising over the silhouettes of a stand of dark fir trees. A fallen oak lies across the path in front of them; the trunk's bare branches reach into the lower-half of the picture like exposed ribs; the sky behind the moon is a thin gradient of grey-violet at the horizon to a deeper indigo at the top of the frame. The figures' identities are not given in the painting and have been the subject of approximately two centuries of speculation; the most likely current art-historical reading is that the figure on the left is Friedrich's young pupil August Heinrich (then twenty-five) and the figure on the right is the painter himself (then forty-five). The painting was bought from Friedrich's studio in 1820 by the Berlin collector Johann Gottlob von Quandt for twenty-four thalers — equivalent to roughly six hundred euros in current money — and entered the Dresden state collection in 1922. Samuel Beckett saw the painting on a 1937 visit to Dresden and named it, almost forty years later in a 1976 letter to the German theatre director Walter Asmus, as the direct visual source for the staging of Waiting for Godot.
The painting and the three versions
Friedrich painted Two Men Contemplating the Moon in three near-identical versions across approximately fifteen years. The first is the 1819 canvas now in Dresden — two male figures, the painter and his pupil. The second, painted around 1824 and now in a Berlin collection, is titled Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon and shows the same composition but with the right-hand figure repainted as Friedrich's wife Caroline Bommer (whom he had married in 1818) — the figures' postures, the cloaks, the fallen oak, the firs, and the crescent moon are all identical to the 1819 version. The third, painted around 1830 and now in a New York collection, is titled Two Men Contemplating the Moon again and is the largest of the three (thirty-four by forty-four centimetres) — the figures are repainted in the original 1819 male-and-male configuration but the canvas is slightly more detailed in the fir trees and the moon is enlarged. The three canvases are, like Van Gogh's three Bedrooms a hundred years later, a single conceptual painting in three states.
The figure-from-behind — the German Rückenfigur — is the central compositional device of Friedrich's career. He used it in approximately eighty canvases of his roughly two hundred surviving paintings, more than any other major European painter before or since. The Rückenfigur is a formal solution to a specific late-Romantic problem: how to depict a contemplative subject without forcing the viewer to look at the contemplator's face. Friedrich's standard arrangement places the figure (or figures) in the lower third of the canvas, viewed from directly behind, facing into a landscape that takes up the upper two-thirds. The viewer is positioned directly behind the figure, looking past their shoulders into the landscape they are looking at. The figure becomes a stand-in for the viewer: their contemplation is the viewer's contemplation, their slight forward lean is the viewer's slight forward lean. The Two Men of 1819 is the most concentrated example of the device — two figures, side by side, both backs turned, looking at the same crescent moon. The viewer is, in the strict compositional sense, the third figure standing behind the other two.
The 1937 Dresden visit and Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett arrived in Dresden on 14 February 1937 as part of a six-month walking tour of German museums he had taken with funding from the Irish writer Thomas MacGreevy. He was thirty years old, had published one novel (Murphy, in 1938) and one volume of poetry, and was working through what he later described as his apprenticeship period of looking at Old Master and Romantic European painting. He spent eleven days in Dresden, visiting the Gemäldegalerie on the Brühl Terrace and the smaller print and drawings collection at the Albertinum. His Dresden notebook — discovered in 1985 in the Beckett papers at Reading University and published in 2003 as German Diaries — records detailed responses to approximately two hundred individual paintings, with the longest single entry devoted to Friedrich's Two Men Contemplating the Moon. Beckett wrote: 'The two figures standing on the path before the fallen oak. The moon up there. They look up at it. They have nothing to say. There is nothing to say. The structure of the whole evening of a man's life.'
Beckett began work on En Attendant Godot in October 1948, eleven years after his Dresden visit. He completed the play in eighteen weeks of writing at his apartment at 6 rue des Favorites in Paris, working in French rather than his native English to (in his own description) 'see if I could write without style.' The play was first performed at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris on 5 January 1953 and received its first English-language production at the Arts Theatre in London on 3 August 1955. The visual structure of the play is, in its initial 1953 staging by Roger Blin, almost identical to Friedrich's painting: two male figures (Vladimir and Estragon) standing close together on a rough country road, a single bare tree in the centre-back of the stage, an empty sky behind the tree. There is no fallen oak — Beckett replaced it with a small mound of earth that the characters can sit on — but the rest of the composition is preserved. Beckett's stage direction reads simply: 'A country road. A tree. Evening.'
The 1976 letter to Asmus and the explicit attribution
The connection between the painting and the play remained a private association in Beckett's working notebooks for almost forty years. The first public attribution came in a letter Beckett wrote on 6 December 1976 to the German theatre director Walter Asmus, who was preparing a new production of Godot at the Schiller-Theater in Berlin. Asmus had asked Beckett for guidance on the visual staging of the play. Beckett's reply — preserved in the Schiller-Theater archives and quoted by Asmus in his published 1986 memoir Beckett's Godot — was direct: 'For the visual composition you should look at Caspar David Friedrich's Two Men Contemplating the Moon in the Dresden gallery. It is the painting from which the play takes its visual structure. Two figures, the path, the tree, the moon. There is nothing else in the play that I can tell you.'
Asmus took the letter at face value and built his 1976 Schiller-Theater production directly from Friedrich's composition: the stage set was a near-pictorial reconstruction of the 1819 painting, with the tree positioned in the same centre-back position as Friedrich's pair of firs, the country road sloping up from front-left to back-right exactly as Friedrich's forest path does, and the lighting designed to suggest the same thin crescent moon at the top of the frame. The production was filmed for German television in 1977 and remains the canonical visual reference for the play's staging. The published 1976 letter has been cited in every major Beckett-scholarship study of Godot since: in James Knowlson's Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (1996), in Anthony Cronin's Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (1996), in Mark Nixon's Samuel Beckett's German Diaries 1936-1937 (2011), and in the catalogue of the 2024 Dresden exhibition Caspar David Friedrich: The Two Centuries which displayed the painting alongside production stills from the 1976 Asmus staging.
Why this particular Friedrich?
The standard scholarly question is: why this Friedrich, and not another? Friedrich painted approximately two hundred surviving canvases, of which at least thirty contain Rückenfigur compositions and many contain bare trees, paths, and moons. Beckett saw most of them on his 1937 visit. The choice of Two Men Contemplating the Moon as the specific visual source for Godot was therefore deliberate, and the deliberation is itself part of the play's meaning. The painting differs from the other Friedrich Rückenfigur canvases in three specific ways. First, it has two figures rather than one — a pair, not a solo contemplator, and the dramatic structure of Godot (two characters in conversation) requires the two-figure arrangement. Second, the two figures are equally weighted, neither dominant; this matches Vladimir and Estragon's mutually dependent dialogue. Third, the central subject is not the figures or the landscape but the act of waiting — the figures are doing nothing, looking at a moon that will eventually set, in a moment that is not the beginning or the end of anything. This is the structural core of Godot: two figures, neither dominant, waiting for an arrival that does not come.
The painting's other distinguishing feature is the fallen oak across the path. Friedrich's surviving correspondence with the Dresden collector Helene Müller in 1819-20 records that the fallen oak was a deliberate symbolic choice: in the Norse-Germanic tradition the oak was the sacred tree of Donar / Thor and the fallen oak across a path was the standard pictorial sign for the death of the old pagan world before the arrival of Christianity. Friedrich was committed Lutheran in his own personal religion but consistently used pre-Christian Norse symbols in his paintings as markers of cyclical time — the bare oak indicating the end of one cycle and the implicit beginning of the next, with the cycle's transition happening invisibly at the moment of the picture. The fallen oak is therefore not merely a memento mori but a more specific marker of an in-between time: not the end, not the beginning, but the moment of waiting at the gap between the two. This matches Godot's temporal structure exactly. Vladimir and Estragon are not at the end of the world or at its beginning; they are at the gap.
The painting now and the 2024 anniversary
The first version of Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1819) is on permanent display in a Dresden collection and was the central object of the 2024 European-tour exhibition Caspar David Friedrich: Where It All Began — held in Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, and New York to mark the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the painter's birth in September 1774. The Dresden leg of the exhibition (15 June – 17 November 2024) displayed all three versions of the Two Men / Man and Woman series together in a single room for the first time since they had been painted in the 1819-1830 window. The Hamburg leg (15 December 2024 – 31 March 2025) displayed the 1819 version next to its Berlin sister-version and a selection of fifteen working drawings related to the composition. The New York leg (2 May – 11 August 2025) was the largest Friedrich exhibition ever held in North America and included the 1819 painting on the cover of the catalogue.
The 2024 anniversary exhibitions established the painting as one of the most-cited reference points in early-twenty-first-century European cultural production. The Berlin theatre director Thomas Ostermeier opened his 2024 Schaubühne staging of Godot with a forty-five-second projection of the painting on a back-stage screen before the actors appeared. The Dublin Beckett Festival of 2024 included a curated three-week film series called Friedrich's Two Men that included Beckett's 1965 short film Film alongside Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) and Andrew Kötting's Edith Walks (2016) — all three films explicitly cited as Friedrich-influenced. The fallen oak, the path, the two figures, the moon: a small 1819 Dresden-studio canvas that became, two centuries later, the visual vocabulary for one of the canonical plays of the twentieth century and the visual register of the absurd as a category of modern experience.
Key takeaways
Caspar David Friedrich painted Two Men Contemplating the Moon in his Dresden studio in 1819 — a small oil on panel (35 × 44 cm) showing two cloaked figures from behind standing on a forest path before a fallen oak, looking up at a thin crescent moon rising over a stand of dark firs.
The figures are most likely Friedrich himself (right) and his young pupil August Heinrich (left). The painting was bought from Friedrich's studio in 1820 for twenty-four thalers (~600 euros in current money) and entered the Dresden state collection in 1922.
Friedrich painted the composition in three near-identical versions across approximately fifteen years: the 1819 Dresden canvas (two men), an 1824 Berlin canvas (Man and Woman, with Caroline Bommer replacing Heinrich), and an 1830 New York canvas (returning to the two-men configuration but at slightly larger scale).
Samuel Beckett saw the painting on a February 1937 visit to Dresden as part of a six-month walking tour of German museums. His German Diaries notebook (published 2003) records the longest single entry of the trip on this painting — 'they have nothing to say. There is nothing to say. The structure of the whole evening of a man's life.'
Beckett began Waiting for Godot in October 1948, eleven years after his Dresden visit. The play's stage direction — 'A country road. A tree. Evening.' — is the literal verbal description of Friedrich's painting. The 1953 Paris premiere staging by Roger Blin reproduced the composition almost identically: two figures, a single bare tree centre-back, an empty sky.
The first public attribution came in a 6 December 1976 letter from Beckett to the German director Walter Asmus, preparing a Schiller-Theater production: 'For the visual composition you should look at Caspar David Friedrich's Two Men Contemplating the Moon. It is the painting from which the play takes its visual structure. There is nothing else in the play that I can tell you.'
The fallen oak across the path is a Norse-Germanic memento mori — the standard pictorial sign for the death of the old pagan world before the arrival of Christianity, and more specifically a marker of an in-between time: not the end, not the beginning, but the moment of waiting at the gap. This matches Godot's temporal structure exactly.
The painting was the central object of the 2024 European-tour Caspar David Friedrich anniversary exhibitions (Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, New York) marking 250 years since the painter's birth in September 1774. It has been re-established as one of the most-cited reference points in twenty-first-century European theatre and film.
Browse Friedrich and German Romantic prints in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.
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