The Tree of Crows

A tree that exceeds the frame

The trunk rises from near the lower centre and divides into two powerful, uneven uprights. One bends back toward the left; the other describes a more pronounced curve before joining the overhead network. These forms repeatedly change direction. The eye has to turn with each limb and choose a new direction at every fork. Thick branches become slender twigs, and each new division produces another interval of sky.

The main limbs have substantial bodies. Brown bark catches limited light along their edges, while darker surfaces and mossy patches give them roughness and weight. The branch extending low toward the left looks almost horizontal, but its contour sags and rises. Above it, smaller branches curl and hook. Friedrich makes the tree’s irregularity legible without organising it into a symmetrical silhouette.

At the top and left, branches disappear beyond the picture. We are too close to see the entire crown. Isabelle Bonithon’s analysis for GrandPalaisRmn identifies this tight framing as a means of bringing the spectator into forceful contact with nature. She connects that confrontation to the Romantic sublime: an experience in which natural grandeur can disturb as well as attract.^[2] Here, the scale of the tree within the canvas matters more than the canvas’s modest physical size.

At the right, the open sky offers relief from the dense tangle on the left. A long branch traces an irregular line into that opening. Above it, the birds carry dark accents farther outward, where there is hardly any wood to interrupt their silhouettes.

From a pencil study to a painted tree

In a 2024 study, art historian Birgit Verwiebe identifies Friedrich’s pencil drawing Leafless Oak, dated 3 May 1809 and now in Oslo’s National Museum, as the basis for the painted tree. Made during a stay in the Neubrandenburg area, the drawing records the branches as they taper and fork; the shading gives them volume. Friedrich returned to that observed structure more than a decade later and adapted it to a much wider scene.^[3] The tree and the distant coast thus bring together motifs from different places.

Comparing the two reveals changes even near the trunk. Verwiebe singles out a broken spur between the main branches, absent from the drawing, whose shape resembles a bird’s head. A painted bird perches on it. She sees a similar resemblance in a broken projection lower on the trunk.^[3] The suggestion can take a moment to register: a shape first seen as damaged wood briefly looks animate. Once seen, the resemblance makes the little bird and its perch harder to separate at a glance.

Broken wood and uncertain growth

At the lower left stands a jagged stump, surrounded by slender, leaning stems. Broken wood lies across the bottom, while another damaged stump rises on the right. Some surfaces look pale and splintered, others dark and weathered. Together these fragments establish a foreground with several different kinds of damage. The surviving tree stands among the remains of other growth.

The fragments point in different directions. On the left, a cluster of stems rises across the strip of sea; on the right, an upturned piece of timber catches warm colour along a broken edge. At the bottom of the picture the curves of fallen wood are barely distinguishable from the grass. The foreground takes time to read, and its obstructions make the slender coastal features look all the farther away.

The little orange marks scattered along the upper twigs need particular attention. They complicate the immediate impression of a wholly leafless tree. The Louvre leaves open whether they are withered leaves or opening buds; the season remains uncertain.^[1] That distinction changes the balance of the image. Remnants of an earlier season suggest persistence after decline, whereas buds suggest growth beginning again. The visible marks permit both possibilities without settling them.

Bonithon develops a reading of death and renewal, relating the broken trees to mortality and the apparent buds and brightening distance to regeneration. She also allows the light to suggest either sunset or sunrise.^[2] This interpretation responds to a real tension within the painting. Its hopeful aspect is strongest when understood as something the viewer discovers gradually, among forms that initially seem exhausted.

Birds within and beyond the branches

The birds near the trunk are individually substantial enough to interrupt the tree’s outlines. Some have extended wings; others present more compact profiles. Their shapes are recognisably different from leaves, despite sharing the branches’ darkness. At the left, a bird crossing an open patch of sky briefly becomes as emphatic as the wood around it. Another, lower down, draws attention toward the earth.

Farther away, the flock becomes a sequence of small, angled marks. The broad-winged birds nearer the tree give way to increasingly fine shapes toward the upper right. These changes of size create depth within a sky that might otherwise read as a flat field of colour. We see the birds at different distances, and the flock appears to extend beyond the immediate space occupied by the tree.

Their movement is also difficult to reduce to a single event. The image gives no clear beginning or ending to their flight, and the arrangement does not require every bird to be travelling in one direction. That uncertainty keeps the scene unsettled. The birds animate an environment in which the larger forms are rooted, broken or immobile.

A coast beyond the mound

Behind the trunk, the ground swells into a low mound. Its rounded contour partially blocks the view, while its sparse covering allows brown earth to remain visible. On either side, the sea appears in thin strips. The horizon is therefore revealed in separate glimpses, interrupted by the forms nearest us.

On the left, pale cliffs catch the distant light. The Louvre associates them with Rügen’s Baltic coastline, while treating Cape Arkona as a proposed identification.^[1] The painting’s coastal character is clearer than its precise viewpoint. For the viewer, the pale strip offers a different kind of surface from the rough timber: remote, bright and almost weightless against the darker foreground.

Colour further separates the distance from the foreground. Above the water, long streaks of yellow, pink and lavender run almost level, while small slants of blue show through higher up. The trunk and debris below stay in half light. We can still pick out their contours because the luminous bands behind them define the spaces between them. The contrast makes the coast seem both close enough to glimpse and beyond immediate reach.

The mound has encouraged a funerary reading. The word Hünengrab was reportedly written on a former frame, now lost. The Louvre notes that no dolmen stones are visible and that the mound’s possible function as a burial site remains uncertain.^[1] A natural rise and a constructed grave can look similar from this distance. The painting supplies no unequivocal archaeological detail to decide between them.

The mound nevertheless affects the experience of looking. Its crest sits behind the lower branching structure, close enough to merge with it in places. This makes the ground feel enclosed even though a sea view lies beyond. The eye can follow its crest but cannot travel much beyond it, except along those narrow, lit stretches of sea.

Coercion, restitution and the Louvre

In 1925 the painting was with Munich’s Caspari gallery. By 1931 it belonged to Georg Simon and Elsbeth Hirschland. They fled antisemitic persecution in 1938, going via the Netherlands to the United States. In 1939 they were compelled to sell the painting with their collection of paintings to Essen’s Museum Folkwang. The Louvre records its display at the Folkwang in 1940–45 and its restitution to the family in the United States in 1946.^[1]

Georg Hirschland had been a patron of the Folkwang. The National Gallery of Art’s provenance biography notes that the family was prevented from taking its collection out of Germany and that money raised by the museum and the city went to an estate administrator.^[4] The Folkwang-Museumsverein’s history records the Nazi regional leadership’s role in the transfer and says that very little of the money raised actually reached the family. It also describes restitution as an urgent postwar task. Elsbeth later gave the museum a different Friedrich painting, Mountain Landscape with Rainbow, in memory of Georg.^[5] That gift explains why one of the Hirschlands’ Friedrich paintings stayed with the Folkwang while The Tree of Crows went elsewhere.

The Tree of Crows passed from Elsbeth to her son Heinz Eugen, known as Henry Hirschland. He sold it to the Peter Nathan gallery in Zurich on condition that the picture not return to Germany. The Louvre bought it from that gallery in October 1975 for 1.2 million Swiss francs.^[1]

The acquisition also altered the Louvre’s collection. A museum essay published in November 2026 describes the purchase, strongly supported by the then head of paintings Michel Laclotte, as the founding event for its collection of nineteenth-century German painting.^[6] Its accession marks both a decision by the Hirschland family about where the painting could go and a decision by the Louvre about what its collection should represent.

When the stones identify a burial

The Dresden Megalithic Tomb in Snow gives a viewer the evidence that is missing from the Louvre mound. Its large stones stand out from the snow as a recognizable structure. The trees establish the scale and location of the tomb, while the tomb itself supplies a reason to read the landscape in relation to burial. In the Louvre picture the trunk occupies the most prominent position and the ground behind it has no equivalent exposed stone structure. The contrast helps explain why a funerary association can be plausible without establishing that a grave is depicted.^{[1] [7]}

The association can also be tested against Friedrich's Megalithic Tomb in Autumn. The anniversary catalogue traces the monument in that work to a tomb near Gützkow that the artist returned to in drawings and later work. The survival of an identifiable subject across those studies gives a basis for comparing the monument with its painted setting. In The Tree of Crows the evidence is different. The visible slope belongs securely to the composition. Its resemblance to a mound and the reported wording from the former frame are clues to interpretation whose force depends on how much weight can be given to each.^{[1] [8]}

Birds and branches against different kinds of light

Friedrich's Berlin Oak Tree in Snow also lets a great spread of small branches define a pale sky. Birgit Verwiebe draws attention to the old leaves that persist on the winter oak and to the remains of a fallen trunk below. The leaves give the eye a way of tracing where the growth continues along the branches, while the fallen wood makes another scale of damage visible on the ground. In the Louvre picture small birds can complicate the first reading of those spaces. The eye has to decide where an angled form belongs to the tree and where a compact silhouette is perched or passing beyond it.^{[1] [3] [9]}

There is a useful distinction between the shape an old tree makes and the amount of movement the surrounding sky can hold. In Berlin, the pale winter setting and the expanse around the branches invite a fairly steady inspection of the oak. In Paris, a spectator can move from a shape fixed against the light to a more distant bird in flight, then return to the wood and see its edges differently. That movement belongs to the act of looking as well as to the represented birds. The damaged tree stays in place while the eye has reasons to look through and beyond it.^{[1] [3] [9]}