Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich was a German painter and the towering figure of Romantic landscape art. Born in 1774 in Greifswald on the Baltic coast, he became known for solemn, spiritual scenes in which tiny human figures stand before vast mountains, seas, and skies. His most famous work shows a man from behind, gazing out over a sea of fog, an image that has come to stand for the whole Romantic idea of a person facing something far larger than himself.

Friedrich treated landscape as a way to speak about faith, death, and the sense of the divine in nature, a bold move at a time when such deep meaning was usually reserved for religious pictures. His reputation faded in his later years and for a long time after his death, then revived strongly in the twentieth century. He is now seen as one of the most important German artists of his era.