Another pervasive theme among Caspar David Friedrich and other German Romantic painters is that of the barren tree, one of the bleakest sights of winter in northern Europe.
This first appeared in Friedrich’s early success, The Abbey in the Oak Wood from 1808–10, giving a dark vision of death, gloom, and the depths of Gothic horror. This shows the ruins of a church amid gnarled and barren trees, silhouetted against a twilight sky. It was exhibited at the Berlin Academy in 1810, and earned him election to that academy the following year.
In this Tree of Crows from about 1822, the birds are only doing what they normally do around dusk, but Friedrich’s wonderfully wizened trees and the eerie light play tricks with us, giving them a thoroughly sinister look.
In 1826, Carl Gustav Carus painted this view of The ‘Three Stones’ in the Giant Mountains, showing a natural granite formation in what is now Poland, in the Riesengebirge Mountains, where Friedrich also painted extensively. In the foreground are the spindly remains of several pine trees.
Friedrich painted several variants of a Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, this in about 1827. A man and a woman, dressed in clothes from a century before, their right shoulders and backs towards the viewer, are looking at the moon. They’re at the edge of a clearing in a forest, an old and part-felled twisted tree to their right, filling much of the upper right of the painting. The tree is barren of leaves and appears dead.
Although Carus didn’t follow a similar course, in his Clouds of Fog in the Saxon Highlands, from about 1828, there are several wizened trees at the top of the cliffs at the right.
Carl Friedrich Lessing was different again. His Monastery Courtyard in Snow from about 1828-29 features the barren snow-covered branches of twin pines.
It was JC Dahl who developed this motif further. In 1829, he painted this Winter Landscape at Vordingborg, showing barren trees and snowy fields near the town of Vordingborg, in the south of the Danish island of Sjælland (Zealand). Plenty of sinister crows in the air and on the ground help build the sense of grim foreboding.
Friedrich occasionally included owls in his paintings for their association with night, as in his Owl on a Bare Tree (1834), although this night is hardly a time for peaceful slumber and pleasant dreams.
JC Dahl continued to paint barren trees, in his Danish Winter Landscape with Dolmen from 1838, again with crows and ancient stone tombs in the snow.
In 1853, towards the end of his career, Dahl revisited barren trees in Oak Tree by the Elbe in Winter.