If the periods of art ever put forth their most iconic works, Romanticism would surely include “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” the oil painting, circa 1818, by German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich.
Like the Romantic period itself, this painting is often called sublime: a word meaning “elevated in dignity” but also “to pass from solid to vapor and back, bypassing the liquid state.” It would be a magically unreasonable experience that Friedrich seems to share with us, as the wanderer atop his mountain beholds an unfolding oneness of jagged peaks and formless fog below.
As an artist of the Romantic aesthetic, Friedrich was working against Enlightenment values (logic, reason, order) that some saw as at least partially contributing to the bloody, monarch-toppling French Revolution. Instead, the Romantics exalted individuals with strong emotions who could find release only in wild, unbridled nature.
In “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” also known as “Wanderer Above the Mist” or “Mountaineer in a Misty Landscape,” the artist exemplified the aesthetic: one man gazing at the vast unknowable. With the midpoint of the painting at his chest, the man’s “heart is the center of the universe,” notated art historian and Harvard University professor Joseph Koerner.
We can’t be certain who Friedrich used as the model for the Rückenfigur (figure seen from behind). Friedrich painted in his studio, helped by his own sketches of Swiss and German landscapes, and it’s easy to imagine the dapper fellow in green jacket and boots leaning upon his cane to be Friedrich himself.
But in his 1990 book “Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape,” Koerner concluded that the depicted figure was the high-ranking forestry official Col. Friedrich Gotthard von Brincken. At the time, von Brincken was a volunteer ranger for King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia’s war against Napoleon.
Koerner wrote, “Von Brincken was probably killed in action in 1813 or 1814, which would make the 1818 ‘Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog’ a patriotic epitaph.”
And did it also subtly celebrate a victory over the French, and the larger stories of Prussian unification and German nationalism?
Whomever Friedrich placed amid that landscape, the artist noted, “The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself,” makes us ask what part of the wanderer’s view was Friedrich’s inner vision.
Skating one boyhood winter day, Friedrich fell through the ice on the Baltic Sea, and his brother died saving him from drowning. Such personal history surely helped form that inner vision of tension between impulse, natural beauty, and terror that the wanderer reveals was within him. One can almost hear his wanderer gasp upon seeing those mists of inspiration.
According to the website of the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, the “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” has resided there since 1970, within reach and still current ever since its creation 200 years ago. Over the years, there have even been some extreme efforts to make it contemporary. In a 1975 book titled “Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko,” scholar and author Robert Rosenblum attempted to connect Friedrich with abstract expressionism. This mid-20th-century American art movement abandoned all conventional representation in favor of spontaneous, formless imagery. While famed critic Hilton Kramer called the idea “brilliant hokem, amusing hokem, but hokem all the same,” such attempts surely show the desire to have the wanderer—and his spirit—stand with us today.
