Caspar David Friedrich

Friedrich painted a man standing on a cliff above a sea of fog and created the most widely used image in Western art for illustrating Romanticism, existential solitude, book covers, and motivational posters. Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818) shows a figure seen from behind, looking out over a mountainous landscape partially obscured by mist. He cannot see what is ahead. Neither can you. He was born in Greifswald on the Baltic coast of what was then Swedish Pomerania. His mother died when he was seven. His brother drowned saving him from thin ice when he was thirteen. He carried guilt about the drowning for the rest of his life. His paintings of isolated figures in vast landscapes are frequently read through this biography, which he neither confirmed nor denied. He studied at the Copenhagen Academy and settled in Dresden, where he spent most of his career painting landscapes that are both precisely observed and emotionally charged. The Monk by the Sea (1808-10) shows a tiny human figure on a beach beneath an enormous empty sky. It was radical: almost no landscape, almost no figure, almost no colour. The painting is mostly atmosphere. His technique was deliberate and slow. He made pencil studies from nature and composed the paintings in his studio, combining elements from different locations into idealised but plausible scenes. The Abbey in the Oakwood shows a ruined Gothic church in a cemetery at twilight: real architectural fragments, real trees, but an invented scene designed to produce a specific emotional response. He had a stroke in 1835 and largely stopped painting. He died in 1840, at sixty-five, and was forgotten until the early twentieth century, when Expressionists and Surrealists rediscovered him.