Friedrich was
the son of a soapmaker and chandler, and studied under Jens Juel at
the Copenhagen Academy from 1794 to 1798. Friedrich was the
founder of German Romantic landscape painting. His style combined
an unprecedented fidelity to reality, based on his travel
experiences, with a metaphysical illumination inspired by Christian
Neoplatonic ideas.
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.