What Inspired Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog?

Caspar David Friedrich is one of the most popular German painters of the 19th century. His Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is often mentioned as the best-known German artwork. The male figure brooding over fog-covered mountains is widely known from posters, cups, calendars, and fan art. Painted just a few years after Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, Wanderer has become an icon of the Romantic Movement as it embodies its key ideas such as individualism, the yearning for unity with nature, and the search for the sublime.

Caspar David Friedrich was born in northern Germany in 1774. He studied art in Copenhagen before living in Dresden for many years. He became a member of Dresden’s artistic circle which included artists like Philipp Otto Runge and Carl Gustav Carus. In 1824, Friedrich became a professor at the Royal Art Academy in Dresden.

His paintings of solitary figures in mysterious, gloomy landscapes became an important visual part of the German Romantic Movement. Nature was a major theme in Friedrich’s art, and the artist rarely portrayed people’s close-ups in his paintings. The figures in his art are usually remote and small, surpassed by the majesty of the natural world around them. Inspired by his Christian faith, Friedrich saw the presence of God in his creation. To him, landscapes were the perfect subject through which he could explore spiritual and religious thoughts. Because of these underlying themes, Friedrich’s landscapes are sometimes called metaphorical as light and the wonder of nature can symbolize the divine in his work.

The Emblematic Wanderer

There are several theories about the identity of the Wanderer. One of them states that the figure portrays Colonel Friedrich Gotthard von Brincken, a heroic Saxon officer who fought in the wars of liberation against Napoleon. If this suggestion is true, the painting could be a patriotic tribute. In Germany, the resistance movement against Napoleon started roughly in 1812, after the beginning of Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign.

Caspar David Friedrich painted his Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog in 1818, three years after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815. Friedrich moved to Dresden in the Kingdom of Saxony in 1798. By the time he painted the Wanderer, he had lived there for twenty years, and it’s plausible that he may have wanted to honor one of the heroes of his new home. Other theories about the figure in Friedrich’s most famous painting may suggest that the work might have been a self-portrait, as the artist had red hair. However, there’s little evidence to prove this theory.

There’s something intense and even fierce about Friedrich’s landscapes. The landscape allowed him to explore Romanticism’s idea of the sublime and the boundlessness of human thought and existence that rises above the physical boundaries of the person’s surroundings. The fog-covered mountains look vast, unattainable, and awe-inspiring. The wanderer invites the viewer to take his place, standing in wonder before the unfolding mountainous landscape.

Friedrich’s Wanderer puts the individual in the center of the divine nature as an integral part of it. Nature is a character in itself in Friedrich’s landscapes. It sometimes takes on an idyllic and benevolent and sometimes a mysterious and menacing mood. The mist-covered mountains suggest hidden obstacles that the Romantic hero has to overcome, but their beauty and boundlessness also inspire awe and wonder before the sublime. Condensing so many of the ideas central to Romanticism in one image, the Wanderer has become something like a visual interpretation of the Romantic Movement’s concepts.

Another Wanderer: Carus and Friedrich 

There’s a similar painting showing a man in the mountains that was made by Carl Gustav Carus, Friedrich’s close friend. He was an important Romanticist in his own right and the personal physician of King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony. Both Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog and Carus’ Wanderer on the Mountaintop, Pilgrim’s Rest were painted in 1818 and it’s unclear which of the two inspired the other. Both works show a man alone on a mountaintop, lost in the contemplation of nature’s wonders.

The wanderer in Carus’ painting is a monk or pilgrim, whereas it’s hard to determine who the man in Friedrich’s painting might be. He is dressed in either a uniform or clothing that resembles the Altdeutsche Tracht, an Old German costume that became popular in the 1800s in opposition to French fashion. Perhaps the ambiguous clothing simply reflects the Romantic Movement’s fascination with the past.

The format that Friedrich and Carus chose for their paintings is unusual. It’s not horizontal, like most landscapes, but vertical, so it seems more like a portrait painting than a landscape. However, the masterful way Friedrich portrays the receding mountains creates depth and conveys the magnificent vastness of the landscape. There are two methods the painter uses for this. One consists of softening the edges of the objects in the distance while the other consists of using paler and cooler colors in the background

In his Wanderer, Friedrich chooses to show the figure as a Rückenfigur, meaning figure from the back. This was a popular stylistic technique that allowed the viewer to put himself in the place of the solitary figure. Since we don’t see the figure’s facial expression, we have to infer the wanderer’s contemplative state from his pose and the moody landscape. This was not normally done in classical art. The Rückenfigur was often used by the German Romanticists, however. It’s especially often found in Friedrich’s paintings.

Romanticism began as a reaction against the values of the Enlightenment that idolized reason. In spite of the order and logic that seemed to point the way to a peaceful and civilized existence, the Age of Enlightenment culminated in the French Revolution of 1789.

There are several reasons why the Wanderer became an emblem of Romanticism. It unites a few key concepts that were particularly important to Romantic writers and painters. These include individuality, introspection and emotion, relationship with nature, and freedom.

Individuality is a vital feature of Romanticism. It goes hand in hand with the idea of opposition towards society. Romanticists like Byron and Shelley popularized the idea of the lone Romantic hero in their works, but the individual and how he relates to society is a recurring theme throughout Romantic thought. In art, introspection meant that the Romanticists steered away from historical and mythological themes, which they saw as irrelevant, and concentrated on exploring the individual’s inner world. William Blake’s art, for instance, embraced imagination, whereas Caspar David Friedrich used his mysterious landscapes to convey his religious and spiritual ideals.

As seen from Goethe’s ideal of the sacred glowing heart, Romanticists strived to find authenticity. The art historian Joseph Koerner pointed out that the center of the painting is roughly where the Wanderer’s heart is, remarking that “the heart is the center of the universe.” This sums up the Romantic Movement’s focus on the emotional, authentic, and irrational parts of human existence.

Although the Romantic Movement came on the heels of the Age of Enlightenment, it did not share its fascination with science and industrialization. Since the Romanticist thinkers, like Goethe and Novalis, saw the material realm as closely interwoven with the spiritual, they weren’t interested in purely empiric, materialistic science. Many of the Romanticists were scientists, like Friedrich’s friend Carl Gustav Carus. However, to them, the material world was only one of the aspects of existence, linked together with the inner divine nature. To Novalis, freedom, thought, and will were all difficult to explain without the unity between spirit and matter. Seen from a materialistic point of view, these concepts shouldn’t even exist in the human mind.

The members of the Romantic Movement were particularly interested in freedom—both physical and spiritual. It’s no surprise that a lot of the leading thinkers of the Romantic Movement were patriots who strived for their countries’ freedom. In Germany, this resulted in a heightened interest in national unity. After all, Germany, as a unified country, didn’t exist during Friedrich’s lifetime. The territories that formed modern Germany were still separate kingdoms, such as the Kingdoms of Prussia or Saxony.

For Goethe, the human imagination and existence were firmly rooted in nature, forming one whole with it. Some Romanticists went as far as to equate Nature and God. This idea is known as pantheism. Not all Romanticists were pantheists, but these ideas flourished along with those of the Romantic Movement. In their works, both Goethe and Novalis strived to experience nature in a direct and authentic way and their writings brought a new emotional dimension to the way people reacted to nature.

While Friedrich is not known to have painted en plein air, he often created sketches on the spot and used them later in his studio to create his compositions. The landscape seen in the painting was inspired by a real place: the Elbe Sandstone Mountains (Elbsandsteingebirge) in Saxony. The soft sandstone has eroded throughout the ages, forming spectacular pillars and plateaus. Friedrich painted this place once more in 1822–23 in his Rocky Landscape in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains. Today, there’s a hiking trail associated with Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog called the Malerweg (or the Painter’s Trail). It passes through a few places that might have been the original locations painted by Friedrich.

Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Through the Years

Some scholars see thematic similarities between Friedrich’s Wanderer and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, particularly the place where Victor Frankenstein climbs up to the glacier.

Many scholars consider Friedrich’s Wanderer one of his few works that center on the Romantic hero, a figure of Romantic social and individual ideals that was popular in the art and literature of the Romantic Movement. Most other paintings by Friedrich focus on the landscape more than the human figures. The Wanderer’s proud posture and large size proportionally to the rest of the composition put him in focus as much as the misty and mysterious landscape he is looking at.

Friedrich’s art had the misfortune of being used by the Nazis to promote their ideals. Because of this, the artist’s popularity rapidly decreased in the years after World War II. Only in the 1970s did interest in his works revive.