Samuel Beckett and Caspar David Friedrich, etc:---

"He would study a painting inch by inch, going back to a gallery to re-see what had enthralled him, whether it was the Pieta at the National Gallery in Dublin or Friedrich's tempestuous canvasses that mirrored Malone's turbulence in "Malone Dies". A bare tree, a moon and two figures that he had seen at an exhibition of Friedrich's in Berlin served as the first glimmer for the writing of Waiting for Godot, a work he claimed to have embarked upon to get back his sanity and away from "the awful prose" he had been writing."