Name: The Painter Who Revolutionized Landscapes
Uploaded: 2026-01-28T17:16:59.000Z
Duration: 6 min 55 s
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Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

If you haven't heard, I wrote a book of essays that'll be out this spring, and

you can pre order it with the links in the description below.

As we say goodbye to the holidays and move into January, we also say goodbye to the festive and charming part of the winter season.

Now comes the grim, punishing, bitter months of winter, the endless months when all that enchanting snow turns to icy sludge.

What we need now, as always, is an artist who understands us.

And for this time of year, there's no better artist than Casper David Friedrich.

Friedrich was a German painter of the early 1800s with a very serious looking face.

He's associated with German Romanticism, a rising intellectual and artistic movement of the period that sought to reconnect humanity with feeling and spirituality.

The painters of that period found that connection in nature, and

so landscape painting became a genre of special significance.

Friedrich's landscapes represent the pinnacle of this movement.

Working for most of his life from Dresden, he focused largely on the austere, beautiful, often wintry environment of northern Germany, with its fir and oak trees, morning mists, harbors and shorelines along the Baltic coast and the rugged terrain of the Harz Mountains.

His paintings don't always depict real places, though.

Often he took elements from very various sites and fuse them together into an invented composition.

He saw in his mind's eye that might be what gives his work such power.

Friedrich's landscapes are realistically rendered, but the landscape is not the subject of these canvases.

The subject is the feeling he has in the presence of the landscape, the staggering encounter with the divinity he sees in it.

In the German philosophical tradition, the sublime is a power or force or beauty that is so great it exceeds our ability to comprehend it, and

we stand before its immensity in awe and terror.

The sublime was a critically important idea in the period after the Enlightenment, when secularism was threatening the core of Christianity.

As artist Anoka Faruki points out, citing Thomas McEvoli, the Romantics could replace the Enlightenment's discredited Christianity with the sublime.

And once again, they found the sublime in nature.

For Immanuel Kant, great German philosopher and theorist of the sublime, this immensity escapes our power of judgment.

But the fact that we're able to experience it at all means that it does correspond to something in us, a sublimity discoverable in the mind.

In his landscapes, Friedrich is trying to paint that moment when the sublime in nature stirs the sublime in us, which is why he made such revolutionary use of the ruken figure, or the figure seen from behind, like this one in his most famous painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.

You're encouraged to put yourself in the shoes of this person, gazing across the misty mountaintops into the infinite sublime.

But as far as Friedrich's ruken figures go, this one is actually a bit of an anomaly.

For the most part, Friedrich's human figures are tiny compared to the landscape they're contemplating, and

that augmented the vastness of the terrain.

The human body is our most natural anchor to determine the scale of things, and

it's also what we're inescapably drawn to in any image.

So there's no better way to simulate a sense of bigness than by featuring the miniature people.

As an aside, this is a technique that Denis Villeneuve used to great effect in his Dune movie from earlier this year.

What's singular about Friedrich's landscapes is the environments he chooses to elicit the sublime.

You might expect sun, dappled, colorful blue sky, pastoral images, but

much more often than not, Friedrich's landscapes are ominous and nebulous, dominated by rolling mists and fogs that obscure objects in the distance.

Trees are barren, their branches contorted like sharp fingers.

And once great Gothic cathedrals are reduced to ruins in the snow.

It's in these landscapes that Friedrich gives us nature at its most intimidating and therefore at its most sublime.

After all, the sublime, like I said before, includes a feeling of terror, the terror of being in the presence of something far more vast than ourselves, of being at the mercy of what we can't wrap our arms or our minds around.

Pastoral landscapes, in their idealized beauty, imply man's control, his dominion over nature.

In Friedrich's stark landscapes, man so small against the world, is not in control at all.

This is why Friedrich is the perfect artist for winter.

This is why so many of his canvases are set in these grim, punishing, bitter months.

He shows us the value of being humbled by nature.

Of course, for the last two years, nature has humbled us plenty.

So maybe Friedrich is a painter not only for this season, but

for our times, as we stand on the shore of the moment, weary, not quite as big as we imagined, we were, peering into the fog ahead.

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