Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

Friedrich painted this in Dresden around 1818. He worked as he always did, making pencil studies outdoors and then composing the picture in the studio, and the landscape here is assembled from rock formations in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains that cannot in fact be seen together from any single spot. He was born in Greifswald on the Baltic coast in 1774, in territory then ruled by Sweden, studied at the Academy in Copenhagen, and settled in Dresden in 1798. He won a competition at Weimar in 1805 and became widely known in 1808 with the Tetschen Altar, which caused an argument because he offered a landscape where a religious painting was expected. He was elected to the Berlin Academy in 1810 and the Dresden Academy in 1818. His reputation faded during his own lifetime and he died poor and largely forgotten in 1840; a Berlin exhibition of thirty-two of his paintings in 1906 began the recovery that has since made him the best-known painter of German Romanticism. He was born a year before the English painter J. M. W. Turner, and the two pursued a landscape painting of feeling and scale in parallel without ever meeting. The Hamburger Kunsthalle acquired the painting in 1970, and it has been on show there since.