"Consider first the scene without the two dark figures, hiding them, say, with a finger. We see a scene late in the day. We, however, do not feel late; indeed we have arrived in time to see the sun's afterglow. The landscape is present to us and the day, though it has passed, has given birth to a beautiful moment... Now we lift our finger from the two halted travellers, and the structure of the landscape suddenly shifted, turning away from us to surround them... What we saw becomes what they had already been seeing in a past long before our arrival. Their anteriority, expressed as our view of their backs, deepened our sense of 'evening' It enabled the canvas not only to depict a late time of day but also to elicit within us an experience of our own lateness as subjects of landscape"

- Joseph Leo Koerner discussing "Rückenfigur" with reference to Friedrich's "Evening" in his book, "Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape".

Picture: "Evening" by Caspar David Friedrich (1821).