Collection: The Wanderer by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818
Caspar David Friedrich
(September 5, 1774 - May 7, 1840)
Casper Friedrich was a German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation, whose often symbolic, and anti-classical work, conveys a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich’s paintings often set contemplative human figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. Art historian Christopher John Murray described their presence, in diminished perspective, amid expansive landscapes, as reducing the figures to a scale that directs “the viewer’s gaze towards their metaphysical dimension”.
The Wanderer is one of his most famous paintings and was created in 1818. It depicts a man standing upon a rocky precipice with his back to the viewer; he is gazing out on a landscape covered in a thick sea of fog through which other ridges, trees, and mountains pierce, which stretches out into the distance indefinitely.
It has been considered one of the masterpieces of the Romantic movement and one of its most representative works. The painting has been interpreted as an emblem of self-reflection or contemplation of life's path, and the landscape is considered to evoke the sublime. Friedrich was a common user of Rückenfigur (German: Rear-facing figure) in his paintings; Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is perhaps the most famous Rückenfigur in art due to the subject's prominence. The painting has also been interpreted as an expression of Friedrich's German liberal and nationalist feeling.