Caspar David Friedrich was born in 1774 in the Baltic port of Greifswald in Swedish Pomerania and became the defining painter of German Romanticism — an artist who transformed landscape into a vehicle for spiritual meditation. Marked by early tragedy (his brother drowned saving him from thin ice when Friedrich was thirteen), he studied at the Copenhagen Academy before settling in Dresden, where he spent most of his quiet, reclusive life.
Friedrich’s paintings typically show solitary figures — or pairs of contemplative observers — gazing into vast, often mist-shrouded landscapes of mountains, forests, and seas. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818), showing a man standing atop a rocky pinnacle surveying a sea of clouds, has become the iconic image of Romantic individualism and the sublime. The Abbey in the Oakwood (1810) depicts a ruined Gothic church in a winter graveyard, skeletal oaks clawing at a pale sky — a meditation on mortality, faith, and the passage of time.
Friedrich believed that landscape painting should express inner spiritual states rather than merely record external appearances. “The artist should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him,” he wrote. His influence waned after his death and he was largely forgotten until the early twentieth century, when the Surrealists and Existentialists rediscovered his work. Today he is recognized as one of the most profound and original painters of the nineteenth century.