Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich painted the loneliest landscapes in European art: a single figure, seen from behind, standing small before fog, sea or mountains that dwarf them. That figure with its back to us, the Rückenfigur, was his signature, and it drops the viewer into the same spot, staring out at something too vast to take in.

He worked in Dresden in the early 1800s, through the years of Napoleon's occupation of the German lands, and his misty ruins and solitary crosses carried a quiet patriotic and religious charge his contemporaries felt keenly. His best-known picture, a man in a green coat on a crag above a sea of cloud, dates from around 1818. For a while he was admired, and even collected by Russian and Prussian royalty.

Then taste moved on. Romanticism fell out of fashion, a stroke in 1835 left him partly paralysed, and he died in 1840 poor and largely forgotten. His work sat ignored for decades until, around 1900, Symbolist painters and a Norwegian scholar named Andreas Aubert pulled it back into view. A 1906 exhibition in Berlin gathered more than 90 of his paintings, the largest showing of his work there had ever been.