Caspar David Friedrich

Friedrich was born in Greifswald on the Baltic in 1774, studied in Copenhagen through 1798, then settled in Dresden as Europe turned from Enlightenment certainty toward something harder to name. His symbolic, anti-classical paintings - silhouettes against night skies, barren trees, Gothic wreckage - caught the current: a generation newly skeptical of materialism, reaching for the spiritual through depictions of nature as divine creation set against human artifice. Early renown followed; the French sculptor David d'Angers said he'd discovered "the tragedy of landscape". But as Germany modernized, his contemplative stillness looked quaint, and he died in obscurity in 1840. The 20th century pulled him back: a 1906 Berlin show, then Expressionists and Surrealists drawing on his work, then the Nazis co-opting it as nationalist currency, which sank him again by association. Since the 1970s the fog has cleared, and he stands now as the signal artist of German Romanticism.