Giant mountain 2

Row after row of mountains melts into the hazy distance in this peaceful scene by Caspar David Friedrich, a German painter who helped shape the Romantic movement. The setting is the Riesengebirge, or Giant Mountains, a range that today runs along the border between Poland and the Czech Republic. Friedrich hiked and sketched in these hills throughout his life, coming back to them time and again. A soft dawn or dusk light glows warm along the sky, and the gentle folds of the land seem to roll on without end.

For Romantic artists, nature was more than pretty scenery. They looked at vast skies and distant peaks and saw something close to spiritual, a reminder of how brief and small our lives really are. Friedrich made this work around 1835, near the end of his life, when a stroke had left him weak and struggling to paint. Not a single figure appears in the picture, only bare land and wide open air, which gives the whole scene a quiet and rather lonely feeling. It is a calm and reflective painting that carries the weight of an artist thinking about time running out.