
The story
Most people come to the Hamburger Kunsthalle for one figure: a man in a green coat standing on a rocky peak, his back to us, looking out over a sea of drifting fog. Caspar David Friedrich painted this 'Wanderer above the Sea of Fog' around 1818, and it has become the defining image of German Romanticism, reproduced on more book covers than almost any other painting.
The museum around it opened in 1869, a grand civic gallery built by the merchants of this trading city, and it has kept collecting ever since across three linked buildings, including a cube of pale stone added in the 1990s for modern art.
The Friedrich is the anchor of a deep 19th-century collection, and the picture itself only reached Hamburg in 1970. The rooms carry you on to Manet and the German Impressionist Max Liebermann, then into Klee, Kirchner and the 20th century. But it is that lone traveller on the crag, turned away from every visitor who stops in front of him, that the crowds photograph.
Collection
25 works
Wanderer above the Sea of FogCaspar David Friedrich, 1818
The Sea of IceCaspar David Friedrich, 1823
NanaÉdouard Manet, 1877
Phryne before the AreopagusJean-Léon Gérôme, 1861
Studio WallAdolph von Menzel, 1872
Three Women in ChurchWilhelm Leibl, 1881
Neubrandenburg in FlamesCaspar David Friedrich, 1835
FloraJan Matsys, 1559
Helen of TroyDante Gabriel Rossetti, 1863
The Hülsenbeck childrenPhilipp Otto Runge, 1805
Tomás Pérez de EstalaFrancisco Goya, 1795
Tombs of the Fallen in the Fight for IndependenceCaspar David Friedrich, 1812
Riding in the bois de BoulognePierre-Auguste Renoir, 1873
The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the TempleMax Liebermann, 1879
Simeon in the TempleRembrandt, 1628
Wreck in the Sea of IceCaspar David Friedrich, 1798
Breton boys bathingPaul Gauguin, 1888
EvaMax Liebermann, 1883
Eve and the SerpentHenri Rousseau, 1900
LionAlbrecht Dürer, 1494
MistCaspar David Friedrich, 1820
Portrait of Maurits Huygens (1595-1642)Rembrandt, 1632
Sea Shore in MoonlightCaspar David Friedrich, 1835
The Girls on the BridgeEdvard Munch, 1901
Young woman in an interior, receiving a letterPieter de Hooch, 1669