When Caspar David Friedrich completed Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, or Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, in 1818, it “was not well received.” So says gallerist-Youtuber James Payne in his new Great Art Explained video above, which focuses on Friedrich’s most famous painting. In the artist’s lifetime, the Wanderer in fact “marked the gradual decline of Friedrich’s fortunes.” He withdrew from society, and in 1835, “he suffered a stroke that left the left side of his body effectively paralyzed, effectively ending his career.” How, over the centuries since, did this once-ill-fated painting become so iconic that many of us now see it referenced every few weeks?
Friedrich had known popular and critical scorn before. His first major commission, painted in 1808, was “an altarpiece which shows a cross in profile at the top of a mountain, alone and surrounded by pine trees. Hard for us to understand now, but it caused a huge scandal.” This owed in part to the lack of traditional perspective in its composition, which presaged the feeling of boundlessness — overlaid with “rolling mists and fogs” — that would characterize his later work. But more to the point, “landscape had never been considered a suitable genre for overtly religious themes. And of course, normally the crucifixion is shown as a human narrative populated by human figures, not Christ dying alone.”
It’s fair to say that Friedrich did not do things normally, both philosophically — breaking away, with his fellow Romanticists, from the mechanistic Enlightenment consensus about the world — and aesthetically. The Wanderer (further analyzed in the Nerdwriter video just below) presents a Weltanschauung in which “landscape was a representation of a divine world order, and man was an individual who watches, contemplates, and feels much more than he calculates and thinks.” To achieve his desired effect, Friedrich assembles an imagined vista out of various elements seen around Dresden, presenting it in a manner that combines characteristics of both landscapes and portraits to “create a powerful sense of space” while directing our attention to the lone unidentified figure right in the center.
The “curious combination of loneliness and empowerment” that results is key to understanding not just the priorities of the Romantics, but the very nature of the aesthetic sublime they reverently expressed. To be sublime is not just to be beautiful or pleasurable, but also to exude a kind of intimidating, even fearsome vastness; how it feels to enter the presence of the sublime can never be fully replicated, let alone explained, but as Friedrich demonstrates, it can effectively be evoked. Hence, as Payne points out, the tendency of current media like movie posters to crib from the Wanderer, in service of the likes of Dunkirk, Oblivion, Into Darkness, and After Earth. Determining whether those pictures live up to the ambitions evident in Friedrich’s artistic legacy is an exercise left to the reader.
Related content:
An Introduction to the Painting of Caspar David Friedrich, Romanticism & the Sublime
The Otherworldly Art of William Blake: An Introduction to the Visionary Poet and Painter
How the Avant-Garde Art of Gustav Klimt Got Perversely Appropriated by the Nazis
Brian Eno on Creating Music and Art As Imaginary Landscapes (1989)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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