Two men stand on a forest path at dusk, backs to us, watching a thin crescent moon rise through a gnarled oak. That is the whole picture. Caspar David Friedrich painted several versions of it, the first around 1819 to 1820, and the Metropolitan Museum's is a later one.
The figures are what art historians call Rückenfiguren, people seen from behind. Friedrich used them constantly. Because we cannot see their faces, we take their place and look at the moon with them. He famously advised painters to close the bodily eye so they could see the picture with the spiritual one first.
The clothes are a hint of politics. Both men wear the so-called Old German costume, with dark coats and soft berets, which was a statement of patriotic, liberal sentiment in the years after Napoleon's defeat. When the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 cracked down on nationalist student groups, that style of dress became risky. A pair of men in banned fashions, quietly watching the moon in a dead forest, is a gentle picture with a sharper edge than it first appears.
The scene also has a long afterlife. Samuel Beckett reportedly named this painting as a source for Waiting for Godot, with its two men on a bare road under a rising moon. The connection fits the mood, though Beckett was fond of leaving his sources vague.
Friedrich himself fell out of favor soon after his death in 1840, and his work was rediscovered only around 1906. Today his moon-watchers are among the best-known images of Romanticism, and the figures are still looking at something that none of us can see.
Friedrich's Two Men Contemplating the Moon appears on our: