Only later on did Count Anton von Thun-Hohenstein insist on placing this painting in his palace chapel. von Ramdohr was scathing when he wrote that it was “a veritable presumption, if landscape painting were to sneak into the church and creep onto the altar.” Indeed, this was supposed to be a secular landscape. However, Friedrich’s Tetschen Altar (1808) provoked a controversy: a simple cross on a rock surrounded by spruces against the background of the sky turning pink. The latter praised the beauty of nature leading to the meeting with God.įriedrich Schiller himself said in 1794 that landscape is perfect for expressing both ideas and emotions. Thanks to his first painting teacher he met the philosopher and pantheist, Thomas Thorild, and the poet, preacher and theologist Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten. Caspar David Friedrich was born in Greifswald, on the territory of the then Swedish Pomerania, in the family of a soap-boiler with a strong, Protestant history. Accustomed to the school-level version of Romanticism, we sometimes forget that it was “the fallen religion”. “Just as the pious man prays without speaking a word and the Almighty hearkens unto him, so the artist with true feelings paints and the sensitive man understands and recognises it.”įriedrich’s painting was created 200 years ago, and we, as its viewers, rank among the more thick-witted. Friedrich himself likened his work of art to a prayer. No other painter has possibly ever created a comparable icon of solitude in the face of the forces of nature no other painter has so emphatically shown the melancholy of unfulfilled hopes. Further away, on the horizon, a mountain range looms wrapped in a morning haze. At his feet, a spectacle of nature takes place: clouds are lifting from a valley, exposing rocky ridges. It shows a man from behind, with a cane, wearing an overcoat, standing on a protruding rock. W anderer above the Sea of Fog also often ends up on the covers of books about German Romantic painting. Three years earlier, Caspar David Friedrich painted a picture that often illustrates the recordings of the Austrian composer’s song. The stranger looks for a spiritual home everywhere, but is condemned to wander forever. This is the lamenting of the Wanderer from a song composed by 19-year-old Franz Schubert to the words of G.P.
I wander silently and am somewhat unhappy,
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