The origins of his landscape art lay in the eighteenth-century veduta, or view. Already in evidence here were the foreground with observer's standpoint, set against an interesting background landscape, in some cases already that type of grand natural scenery which in the nineteenth century would be termed "the sublime" - lonely mountain ranges or ocean vastnesses that, in the sensitive viewer, aroused feelings of religious awe and insight. But Friedrich's pictures have none of the travelogue character found so frequently in eighteenth-century landscapes. His views of nature are externalized embodiments of the mood of the figures in the foreground, "atmospheric landscapes," to use the nineteenth-century term. They are invariably determined by two elements: the observed environmental situation and the attitude of the person or persons observing it, figures usually seen from the back and often magnified in proportion to the scene.