Efter stormen

After the storm’s ravaging, the splintered mast rises against the sky. Sheets and rigging flap in the wind, and the reddish-brown sail sinks into the sea. With great care the painter has rendered the sunlight breaking through the clouds, the rain out over the water, and the white foam thrown up by the enraged sea. Caspar David Friedrich grew up in Greifswald on the Baltic and returned all his life to the nearby island of Rügen, where he watched sky and sea in every kind of weather; ships on the water were a recurring theme in his art, often as an emblem of life’s voyage, in which human drama and the immediate experience of nature are fused. The painting is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).