In the manner of Caspar David Friedrich
German, 1774–1840
The Retreat, 2026
Oil on canvas
95 × 76 cm
Never painted.
Commissioned for the collection, 2026.
PAB 2026.6.5
Two figures, one standing with a stick and one sitting on the rubble, look up the valley at a glacier that has shrunk almost out of the picture. A wooden post in the foreground marks where the ice used to be. Friedrich painted *The Sea of Ice* as a wreck of frozen slabs, nature winning outright. Two hundred years later the ice is losing, and people come up at weekends to watch.
The brief
Two figures seen from behind on a moraine of grey rubble looking at a shrunken glacier far up the valley, a wooden marker post in the foreground, cold clear light. German Romantic oil painting, a single figure seen from behind standing before a vast luminous landscape, fog and mist dissolving the middle distance, cold blue-grey and violet dawn light, bare trees and rock rendered with meticulous fine brushwork, immense silence and symmetry, thin smooth glazes, an atmosphere of longing. Flat frontal reproduction of the painting, the canvas fills the frame edge to edge, even lighting, no frame, no wall, no text.
Written to the house rules. The painter's name does not appear.
Take it home
The painting on this room's wall, at its own proportions, nothing written on it.
