Friedrich caspar david wikipedia

Painting by Caspar David Friedrich

The Stages of Life (German: Die Lebensstufen) is an allegoricaloil painting of by the German Romanticlandscape painter Caspar David Friedrich.

Completed just five years before his death, this picture, like many of his works, forms a meditation both on his own mortality and on the transience of life.

The painting is set on a sea shore and shows in the foreground an aged man with his back turned to the viewer, walking towards two adults and two children on a hilltop overlooking a harbour.^[1] The figures are echoed by five ships shown in the harbour, each at a different distance from the shore, an allegorical reference to the different stages of human life, to the end of a journey, to the closeness of death.

Although many of Friedrich's paintings are set in imagined landscapes, The Stages of Life is recognisably located at Utkiek, near his birthplace of Greifswald in today's northeastern Germany. The figure