Mattino in montagna

One reason so many paintings by Friedrich, the great German Romantic, are in Russia is a single well-placed admirer. The poet Vasily Zhukovsky, tutor to the Russian imperial family, visited Friedrich's studio in Dresden and kept buying his work for the court in Saint Petersburg. This view is built the way Friedrich liked, ridge behind ridge dissolving into pale morning haze, with one small figure set on a height to look out at it. He wanted such a landscape felt as much as seen. Painted around 1822, it first hung at the palace of Pavlovsk outside the capital, and only came into the Hermitage in 1963.