Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was the most important German romantic painter. Even his person embodied the typical romantic: He was more introverted, Environmentalist and religious, he saw nature as a mirror of human emotions. In his meticulously painted paintings Friedrich reached an incomparable metaphysical transparency.

The painter should not just paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees in himself. "With this recommendation to his painter colleagues, Caspar David Friedrich explained the driving force and the meaning of his paintings.

The Landscapes takes in his work a prominent position. Friedrich undertook with friends long hikes through the mountains and along the coast. He experienced man in his smallness compared with the immense power of nature. The solitary figures look longingly in vast landscapes with distant horizon. Consult often the viewer back on, so that this can empathize with them. Using symbolic metaphor, the moon as the universe and tree stumps as an indication of transience, he produced contemplative romantic feelings and religious sentiments. With its natural moods Friedrich wanted to gain insight into the human soul.

At the age of 24, after an academic training in Copenhagen, drew it the young artists to Dresden. In the Elbe a crossroads formed around him, and other painters and poets such as Tieck and Schlegel to the center of the early Romantic period. The characteristic of the Romance is the mutual impact of poetry and painting. Friedrich's landscapes are visually mirror the feelings and seek to express what the poetry with words. "Internally, the mysterious path leads. In us, or nowhere, eternity with its worlds, the past and future." So said the poet Novalis expressed representative of the early Romantics.