The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) – Caspar David Friedrich

The quintessential painting of the Romantic era is none other than “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”, painted by the German artist hailed as the father of German Romanticism, Caspar David Friedrich. The image is familiar to most: a young man of dignified bearing confronts the breath-taking immensity of nature, his averted profile inviting the viewer into contemplation of a panoramic sky and clouds like billowing waves that swamp the senses. The magnificent scene resounds a profound aesthetic experience that inspires awe of the majesty of nature, or what is known as the ‘Sublime’ in the Western philosophical tradition. The painting epitomises the aesthetic and ideological shifts that reshaped the paradigm of Western art at the turn of the 19th century. Artists were turning away from the representation of religious mores and scripture, instead favouring the depiction of the empirical and observable wonder of nature. While his contemporaries gravitated to warm and sunny scenes in their evocation of the natural sublime, Friedrich decided to draw from personal memories for his portrayal of a lofty vista– lined with clouds in the chilly, morning twilight before the sun rises above the horizon– that perhaps serves as an elegy for his younger brother, who fell through a frozen lake and drowned right before his eyes. Friedrich’s interpretation of the Sublime did not receive much recognition during his lifetime. The underlying philosophy of “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” only received critical esteem posthumously. As any viewer of the painting will attest, Freidrich not only depicted an encounter between an individual and the breath-takingly boundless magnitudes of nature, but the realisation of the smallness of our lives against forces greater than us.