Abbey in the Oakwood

1809–10

Oil on canvas, 110.4 × 171 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Monks carry a coffin through a snowy graveyard toward a ruined Gothic church among bare oaks. The painter Carl Gustav Carus, a friend, rated it among the deepest achievements of modern landscape.

Painted as the companion to The Monk by the Sea; the two were meant to be seen as a pair.
Look at the window: its model was the Eldena abbey ruin outside Greifswald, made more perfect here and fitted with a doorway.
Around 1830 the real ruin was restored to look much like the painted one, possibly under the crown prince's influence.
Faith and death meet here, and the painting works as a meditation on mortality rather than a record of a real place.
The crown prince kept it for about twenty years; it entered the Berlin museums in 1957 from the destroyed royal palace.

Image: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie · Public Domain Mark 1.0