Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich was a German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his time and one of the most original geniuses in the history of landscape painting. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world.

He was intensely introspective and often melancholic and he relied on deep contemplation to summon up mentally the images he was to put on canvas. 'Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with your spiritual eye', he wrote, 'then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react on others from the outside inwards.'