Les monts des Géants (Riesengebirge)

Caspar David Friedrich walked the Riesengebirge, a range on the old border between Silesia and Bohemia, in 1810 with a painter friend, and he kept using the sketches he made there for the rest of his life. This mountain view dates from around 1830, worked up from that 20-year-old memory rather than from the spot. The hills fold away into a pale haze until earth and sky stop being separate things, and a single small figure sits in the foreground taking it in. That solitary watcher before an immense landscape is Friedrich's signature. By the time he painted this he was in his mid-50s and going out of fashion, as taste turned toward brighter, more worldly pictures. He died largely forgotten in 1840, and only around 1900 did people begin to see how strange and modern his quiet landscapes were.