Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

A man in a dark green coat stands on a crag, seen from behind, looking out over a sea of mist with peaks breaking through it. Friedrich painted this around 1818, in the German lands after the long wars against Napoleon had finally ended, a moment when many of his countrymen were turning inward, toward nature and faith, rather than out toward politics. He almost never lets you see his figures' faces. This device, a person shown from the back, is called a Ruckenfigur, and it puts you where the wanderer stands, so that you are looking at the view rather than at him. The landscape itself is invented. Friedrich sketched real places in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains south of Dresden, then recombined the rocks and summits in the studio into a scene that exists nowhere. People often read the picture as a lone soul facing something vast, and Friedrich would not have argued, though he was a devout man who saw God in weather and stone. The wanderer wears good walking clothes and holds a cane, dressed for the climb he has just made.