Painted between 1809 and 1810, Caspar David Friedrich's The Abbey in the Oakwood is one of the starkest images of German Romanticism. Through a screen of leafless, broken oaks rises the ruined Gothic choir of a monastery; a procession of monks carries a coffin toward its open door, beneath a low winter sky. Snow, bare graves, and dead trees fill the foreground. Almost nothing in the picture is alive except, by implication, the act of mourning itself.

Friedrich paired the work with The Monk by the Sea, and the two were bought together by the Prussian crown in 1810. The ruined abbey, the leafless oaks, and the funeral procession make a meditation on death and transience, and on faith surviving its own institutional ruin. The painting is held at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin and is a founding image of the Romantic and Gothic sensibility.