In the fourth installment of our One Movement, One Artist series, we turn back the clock: past the turbulent avant-gardes of modernism, and well before the Impressionists stepped out en plein air. Our subject is Romanticism—that tempestuous voice of the heart, of dreams, and of nature’s primal majesty; our artist, the German painter Caspar David Friedrich, whose enigmatic, back-turned figures open a luminous portal onto the soul’s uncharted depths.
Perched atop a jagged precipice, a lone man stands with his back turned to us. Before him stretches an infinite, milky expanse of fog, punctuated here and there by fractured crags and distant, vaporous peaks. We cannot see his face, yet his emotional state is instantly familiar. In his place, we would register the same duality: a creeping frisson at our own insignificance set against boundless nature, counterbalanced by an overwhelming, ineffable awe.
This solitary image encapsulates almost the entire ethos of Romanticism. This essay first charts the contours of the Romantic movement and examines how it emerged as a fiery insurrection against the mechanistic rationalism of the Enlightenment. We then turn to the master behind this enduring icon: Caspar David Friedrich—a melancholic figure largely misunderstood in his own lifetime, consigned to near-total oblivion after his death, and later resurrected in the twentieth century as the quintessential standard-bearer of Romanticism. Finally, we trace how this profound wave of feeling reverberated through late Ottoman painting and literature.
The Movement: What is Romanticism?
The Triumph of Sentiment over Pure Reason
Eighteenth-century Europe styled itself the “Age of Enlightenment.” Reason, mathematical order, empirical science, and continuous progress were heralded as humanity’s surest path toward emancipation and happiness. Romanticism, which held sway across the Western world from the 1770s through the 1850s, arose as a tempestuous backlash against this dogmatic rationalism. Yet the Romantics were also children of the Enlightenment: Immanuel Kant, after all, served both as the Enlightenment’s philosophical architect and as the foundational theorist of the Romantic “sublime.”
Romanticism was never merely a matter of brushwork or pictorial style; it was a holistic worldview that shook literature, music, philosophy, architecture, and politics to their core. Its initial sparks flared in German literary circles: Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774—the very year of Friedrich’s birth—while the Schlegel brothers’ journal Athenaeum, launched in 1798, served as the movement’s theoretical manifesto. The same restless spirit permeated music: Franz Schubert’s lied The Wanderer (1816) and his song cycle Winterreise (1827) conjured the exact solitary traveler motif that haunts Friedrich’s canvases.
At its core, Romanticism rested on three foundational pillars:
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Emotion, intuition, and passion plumb depths that pure intellect and logic can never reach.
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There exist vital realms of human consciousness that defy rational explanation: dreams, spiritual devotion, the terror of the unknown, passionate longing, and a mystical reverence before nature.
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The sovereign individual navigating their own interiority and subjective truth holds far greater consequence than the dogmatic rules codified by academic institutions.
In this sense, Romanticism stands as one of the first radical critiques of the Western faith in progress and instrumental reason that had dominated since the Renaissance. It was also among the very first cultural currents to explicitly proclaim itself a “movement”—setting a precedent of programmatic rebellion inherited by nearly every subsequent “-ism.”
The Sublime: The Fine Line Between Terror and Awe
At the heart of the Romantic imagination lies the sublime (das Erhabene). Edmund Burke’s 1757 treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, placed the concept at the center of aesthetic theory, a thesis Immanuel Kant subsequently deepened in his 1790 Critique of Judgment. For Burke, the “beautiful” evokes harmony, proportion, and serene delight; the “sublime,” by contrast, shatters our equilibrium, commanding awe precisely through its capacity to unsettle. A fathomless ocean, a crack of lightning, a bruising tempest, a sheer abyss, or a colossal mountain range—all elicit a simultaneous collision of dread and transcendent aesthetic pleasure.
Small wonder, then, that Romantic painters gravitated toward splintered shipwrecks, roiling waters, and storm-rent skies to expose human fragility against nature’s elemental fury. Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819), inspired by a horrific maritime disaster in 1816, remains one of the most searing testaments to this existential struggle.
The movement’s visual vocabulary was unmistakable: sublime wilderness exposing human precarity; dark psychological landscapes steeped in dreams, nightmares, and madness; a melancholic yearning for medieval Gothic architecture, ruins, and exotic horizons; Orientalist visions; and the impassioned cries of nations demanding liberty and political autonomy.
Across Europe, these themes crystallized in remarkably distinct forms. In Britain, William Blake rendered visionary mysticism, while John Constable captured the idyllic hush of the pastoral countryside. J. M. W. Turner—in works such as Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps and The Fighting Temeraire—dissolved blizzard and vapor into incandescent swirls of light, laying the aesthetic groundwork for Impressionism (Monet would encounter Turner’s work firsthand in London in 1870–1871). In Spain, Francisco de Goya confronted the atrocities of war and human depravity in The Third of May 1808. In France, Eugène Delacroix mobilized revolutionary fervor in Liberty Leading the People, while in Germany, Caspar David Friedrich transfigured landscape painting into a theater of mystical meditation.
The Artist: Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)
Friedrich embodied the Romantic spirit with a hushed intensity unmatched by his peers. Now celebrated as the titan of German Romantic landscape painting, his life and posthumous trajectory mirrored the tragic solitude of the vistas he rendered.
Life and Trials
Born on 5 September 1774 in Greifswald—then under Swedish rule in Pomerania on the Baltic coast—Friedrich was the sixth of ten children born to a candle-maker and soap-boiler. His childhood was punctuated by relentless loss: his mother died in 1781 when he was seven, followed by the deaths of two sisters and a brother. At thirteen, he suffered the defining trauma of his life: while ice-skating on a frozen lake, the ice gave way, and his younger brother Johann Christoffer drowned attempting to pull him from the water. This tragedy cast a permanent pall of melancholy and acute mortality over Friedrich’s consciousness.
Following his studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen between 1794 and 1798, Friedrich settled in Dresden, a thriving nexus for landscape art and Romantic thought, where he would remain for the rest of his life. His first major controversy erupted in 1808 with The Cross in the Mountains (Tetschen Altar). By designing a pure landscape to serve as a church altarpiece, Friedrich drew virulent condemnation from the critic Basilius von Ramdohr; the ensuing debate marked the painter’s pioneering reinvention of nature as a devotional lexicon.
His breakout moment arrived at the 1810 Berlin Academy Exhibition with The Monk by the Sea and The Abbey in the Oakwood, both acquired by the Crown Prince of Prussia. In 1818, he married Caroline Bommer. His inner circle included the physician and painter Carl Gustav Carus and the Norwegian landscapist Johan Christian Dahl. A fervent German patriot during the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, Friedrich pointedly dressed several of his figures in nationalist altdeutsche Tracht (Old German costume).
Yet this period of acclaim was fleeting. Friedrich’s uncompromising temperament, austere Protestant faith, and increasingly inward demeanor were out of step with shifting public tastes, which leaned toward naturalistic realism. Though appointed an associate professor at the Dresden Academy in 1824, he was passed over for the prestigious chair of landscape painting, sinking into bitter withdrawal. Marginalized and forgotten, he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1835 and passed away in Dresden on 7 May 1840, in near-total poverty and obscurity.
An Inversion of Monet’s Plein-Air Doctrine
Where the Impressionist Monet would set up his easel directly in front of the elements to chase the transient flicker of natural light, Friedrich adopted an antithetical method: he never painted his finished landscapes outdoors.
Instead, he took solitary, meditative walks across the countryside, filling sketchbooks with precise anatomical and botanical studies before retreating into the absolute silence of his studio. Georg Friedrich Kersting’s 1811 portrait, Caspar David Friedrich in his Studio, depicts the master in a spartan room with the lower window shutters deliberately barred. There, Friedrich filtered his observational sketches through his inner eye, synthesizing them into metaphysical landscapes that never existed in geographic reality. As he famously noted around 1830: “The painter should paint not only what he has before him, but also what he sees within himself. If, however, he sees nothing within himself, then he were better to forgo painting what he has before him.”
Herein lies the watershed between Impressionism and Romanticism: where the Impressionist records the fleeting optical impression, the Romantic evokes the soul’s intuition of the eternal.
A Masterpiece in Focus: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1817)
Housed in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, this relatively modest canvas (measuring approximately 95 × 75 cm) has emerged as Romanticism’s most indelible visual touchstone.
Poised at the lip of a sheer, rocky precipice stands a solitary man, viewed entirely from behind. Clad in a dark green frock coat and leaning on a walking stick, his hair is ruffled by a highland gust. Before him unfolds an expansive, ethereal sea of white and grey vapor, pierced by jagged ridges, crags, and the faint blue silhouettes of distant peaks. While Friedrich drew inspiration from the Elbe Sandstone Mountains near Dresden, the topography is an idealized montage—an architectural construction of disparate sketches unified in the isolation of the studio.
The Mystery of the Rückenfigur
The Rückenfigur—a figure viewed from behind—was not novel to art history, but Friedrich elevated it from a marginal compositional device into his primary conceptual signature. Joseph Leo Koerner explores this phenomenon comprehensively in his seminal 1990 monograph, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape.
Had the figure faced forward, our gaze would inevitably fixate on his expression, locking us into the role of passive observers. Denied his face, our perspective merges with his. We occupy his stance on the precipice; his gaze becomes our own as we look out over the abyss. The painting ceases to be an external depiction of a vista and transforms into the internal phenomenology of looking. Friedrich deployed this radical empathy across multiple masterworks, notably Two Men Contemplating the Moon and Chalk Cliffs on Rügen.
Reading the Canvas
Wanderer functions as a visual primer on the Burkean sublime. The vast, fog-cloaked mountain range evokes nature’s infinite expanse and humanity’s mortal insignificance. Yet the traveler is neither cowed nor defeated; he occupies the apex, composed and upright. The canvas thus harbors a deliberate tension: between the ungraspable grandeur of the cosmos and the dignity of human consciousness capable of holding that vastness in its mind’s eye.
Certain art historians link the figure’s attire to the anti-Napoleonic Wars of Liberation (1813–1815), proposing the work as an elegiac monument to a fallen Prussian officer. In the absence of written testimony from Friedrich himself, the painting remains suspended in productive ambiguity.
Oblivion, Ideological Co-optation, and Rebirth
Friedrich’s broader oeuvre reverberates with this same existential solitude. Consider The Monk by the Sea (1808–1810), where an oppressive expanse of leaden sky and obsidian water dominates the frame, reducing the monk on the shore to an almost negligible point. Upon its premiere, the playwright Heinrich von Kleist famously remarked that gazing upon the canvas felt as if one’s eyelids had been sheared away. With its radical void, the painting anticipates Mark Rothko’s Color Field abstractions by a century and a half, as art historian Robert Rosenblum perceptively observed.
Similarly, The Sea of Ice (1823–1824), with its shattered ship crushed beneath monolithic slabs of Arctic ice, confronts us with nature’s unforgiving indifference. While often read through the prism of his childhood tragedy on the ice, historians equally trace its imagery to the sensational British Arctic expeditions of the period.
Yet the posthumous fortunes of Friedrich’s work were fraught with misfortune:
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Post-1840 (The Great Eclipse): By the time of his death, the art world had moved decisively toward Realism and Biedermeier narrative painting. For six decades, Friedrich was virtually expunged from art history, omitted even from authoritative late-nineteenth-century surveys. His legacy was kept flickering largely through the efforts of his friend Dahl.
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1906 (The Centenary Rediscovery): At the Deutsche Jahrhundertausstellung held at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie, 93 of Friedrich’s works were assembled. Alfred Lichtwark, director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, observed that gallery-goers stood before these canvases transfixed, wide-eyed with shock and wonder.
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The 1930s and 1940s (Dark Co-optation): The Nazi regime co-opted Friedrich’s patriotic sentiments and Germanic iconography, retrofitting his landscapes into blood-and-soil propaganda as emblems of the “pure Nordic spirit”—a toxic association that inflicted severe damage on his critical standing.
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The Postwar Era: Tainted by fascist misappropriation, Friedrich was viewed with skepticism in the West for decades, while the German Democratic Republic claimed him as an anti-feudal symbol of national heritage.
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1970s to the Present (Critical Reassessment): Gerhard Richter’s 1972 voyage to Greenland in the wake of The Sea of Ice, major bicentenary retrospectives in Hamburg and Dresden in 1974, and Robert Rosenblum’s foundational 1975 study Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition restored Friedrich to his rightful rank.
Following his 250th anniversary in 2024—marked by major exhibitions across Hamburg, Berlin, and Dresden—and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2025 retrospective Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, his work is increasingly reappraised through contemporary ecological consciousness, reverence for nature, and the architecture of the human psyche.
Today, the definitive repositories of Friedrich’s legacy reside in the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, The Sea of Ice), the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin (The Monk by the Sea), and the Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden.
A Note from Turkey: Romanticism and the Ottoman World
During the zenith of European Romanticism, the Ottoman Orient exercised a potent allure over Western painters and writers. The Greek War of Independence (1821), Lord Byron’s martyrdom at Missolonghi in 1824, and Eugène Delacroix’s The Massacre at Chios (1824) forged a romanticized yet exoticized European perception of the Levant.
Conversely, Ivan Aivazovsky, the Russian Romantic marine painter of Crimean-Armenian heritage, fell deeply under the spell of Istanbul’s atmospheric light, visiting the imperial capital eight times. First arriving in 1845 aboard a naval expedition, Aivazovsky received commissions for over thirty canvases from Sultan Abdülaziz in 1874. Today, some thirty of his luminous, stormy depictions of the Bosphorus are preserved in Dolmabahçe Palace and across Turkish public collections.
Within Ottoman painting itself, the adoption of Western-style easel painting coincided with the waning of European Romanticism. Nonetheless, its undercurrents surface among the first generation of Ottoman “military painters.” In Şeker Ahmed Pasha’s Forest (in the collection of the Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture), the brooding, claustrophobic atmosphere filtered through dense branches draws as much from Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon School as from his Parisian training under Gérôme, reading as an Ottoman dialogue with the Romantic sensibility of nature. Similarly, Süleyman Seyyid’s fruit still lifes have long been characterized by art historians as an idiosyncratic synthesis of classical restraint and romantic lyricism.
The profoundest resonance of Romanticism in Ottoman-Turkish culture, however, unfolded across literature. The intellectuals of the Tanzimat modernization era fell deeply under the sway of French Romanticism, most notably Victor Hugo. Namık Kemal’s patriotic drama Vatan yahut Silistre (Motherland or Silistria, 1873) and Abdülhak Hâmid Tarhan’s grief-stricken poetic monument Makber (The Tomb, 1885), penned after the premature death of his wife, stand as towering examples. Yet Tanzimat Romanticism remained an eclectic amalgam, intimately entwined with classical Divan poetic traditions. Much like the melancholic vistas of Friedrich’s canvases, themes of mortality, grief, cosmic grandeur, and individual alienation found monumental expression in their verse.
Join us in the next chapter of our series, as we follow the trail of another movement and another master…
