A Walk at Dusk

Caspar David Friedrich puts a figure at the centre of a landscape, facing away, and lets the viewer take their place. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is the famous instance, though the device recurs constantly: backs turned, looking at mountains, moons, ruins and ships. The landscapes are rarely records of real places. He assembled them from separate studies into arrangements built to carry religious feeling, which got him into arguments when he put a crucifix in an altarpiece landscape with no church architecture around it. He worked in Dresden, sold reasonably in his early career, then watched taste shift toward realism and died in 1840 poor and largely forgotten. The Nazis later co-opted him, which complicated his recovery. The paintings survived that. The stillness in them has no political content at all.