Life stages

At dusk on a Baltic shore, an old man in a fur hat walks toward his family. Out on the water, five ships sit at different distances from land. Friedrich, near the end of his life, painted himself turning toward the horizon.

The story behind the painting

Friedrich painted this allegory about five years before his death; Wikipedia dates it 1835, while Wikidata gives 1834. Like many of his works it is a meditation on his own mortality and the passing of life. Unlike his many imagined landscapes, this place is real: Utkiek, near his birthplace of Greifswald in northeastern Germany. The figures have been identified as his family. The old man is Friedrich himself, the boy his son Gustav Adolf, the young girl his daughter Agnes Adelheid, the older girl his daughter Emma, and the man in the top hat his nephew Johann Heinrich.

What to look for

The canvas, about 72 by 94 cm, shows a Baltic harbour in the dusk. Two adults and two children, dressed as townspeople, form a semicircle on the shore. In the middle a boy holds up a Swedish flag while a girl reaches for it, and a woman leans toward them with her hand raised. On the far left the old man stands outside the circle, in a coat and fur hat while the others wear summer clothes. On the sea, a large ship draws in its sails and two small boats have almost reached land. The bow of the big ship lines up exactly with the two children.

Meaning and intent

The five people echo the five ships of the opening description, though the article later counts three sailing ships returning home, each at a different distance from shore, as stages of life and nearness to death. One reading makes the small boats in shallow water the children, just beginning their voyage, the central ship the mother, and the furthest ship, vanishing into the horizon, the old man leaving this life. Other critics reverse it: the distant ships are the parents setting out, and the big ship near shore is the old man, coming home to harbour after a full life. Both readings meet in the same quiet farewell.

Legacy

The Swedish flag is personal. Greifswald belonged to Sweden from 1630 until 1815, when it passed to Prussia, yet twenty years later Friedrich shows his children holding a Swedish pennant, looking toward the sea beyond which Sweden lies. He named his son after the Swedish king Gustav Adolf IV, and the writer Atterbom said Friedrich considered himself half-Swedish. The title is probably not his own: wary of descriptive titles, he likely left it unnamed, and it was renamed during a revival of interest in the late 19th or early 20th century. It is in the Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig.