Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
A man in a frock coat stands on a rock, gazing out over a sea of fog. Romanticism seeks the sublime: nature that both frightens and allures.
We see him from behind – a Rückenfigur – so that we see the landscape through his eyes.
Caspar David Friedrich was born in 1774 in Greifswald on the Baltic and worked for most of his life in Dresden. He was the leading landscape painter of German Romanticism. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is usually dated to around 1817–1818. It is not dated on the canvas, and its making is not documented in detail.
A man in a dark green frock coat stands with his back to us on a rock. He holds a walking stick, and his hair is blowing in the wind. Before him, mists billow between peaks and crags. Far away a mountain rises out of the fog, and the sky is bright but hazy. The man is placed exactly in the centre of the picture. His clothes are simple but elegant, and his bearing is calm and self-assured.
The landscape is not a real view. Friedrich assembled it from sketches made at various places in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, the area known as Saxon Switzerland south of Dresden. Some of the mountains can be identified. He composed them into an ideal landscape meant to evoke a feeling rather than record a place.
The man seen from behind is known in German as a Rückenfigur. It was one of Friedrich’s hallmarks. Because we cannot see his face, we can more easily put ourselves in his place and experience the landscape through his eyes. We do not know who the man is. He has sometimes been identified with a particular person, but this is speculation. The figure turns the picture into a meditation on the act of seeing itself.
The painting is in oil on canvas and has a smooth surface. Friedrich built up the fog with thin, pale layers that make the forms dissolve. The man’s dark figure stands in strong contrast to the light. The palette is cool, with grey, blue and white. The picture is just under a metre high and in portrait format.
The picture is usually linked to the Romantic idea of the sublime: nature so vast and powerful that it both frightens and fascinates. It has also been read religiously, as an image of humanity’s encounter with God in nature, and politically, in the light of German nationalism after the Napoleonic Wars. All these readings have some support, but none is certain. The sublime and the infinite were central concepts for Romantic artists and philosophers.
Friedrich was partly forgotten after his death in 1840 and was rediscovered in the early 20th century. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog was acquired by the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1970. Today it is one of the best-known images of Romanticism. It has become a symbol of the solitary, reflective individual and adorns the covers of countless books on philosophy and history. It is also shown in major exhibitions on Romanticism.