Giant Mountains Landscape with Rising Fog

In July 1810 Friedrich walked into the Riesengebirge with his friend, the painter Georg Friedrich Kersting. They crossed the ridge and climbed the Schneekoppe, its highest point, and Friedrich drew the whole way, filling sheets with rocks, ridge lines and single trees. He went on working from those sheets for the rest of his life.

This canvas came about nine years later, painted in his Dresden studio, a room so bare that visitors remarked on it. The view can still be located. Those are the hollows called the Sieben Gruende, with the Schneegruben ridge showing through the fog behind them.

What is missing is any sign that people lived there. No path, no hut, no walker, not even a tree. He kept the topography exact and left all of that out. The valleys below him had been worked for glass and ore for centuries, and the summit he had climbed in 1810 carried a stone chapel where walkers sheltered.