A painting a day · No. 17 of 38
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)
c. 1818 · Oil on canvas · Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg
The story
A man stands on a rock above the clouds. We see him only from behind — a device Friedrich used again and again (the German word is Rückenfigur) — so we look at the view through his eyes.
Look closer
- He stands exactly in the middle of the picture.
- The layers of fog get paler as they go back, which is how the painting shows distance.
- The rocks and peaks are real places in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, but Friedrich put them together from different sketches.
Did you know
It has become the picture of the Romantic idea of the lone individual facing nature — and today is used on countless book covers.
Why we can show it
Caspar David Friedrich died in 1840. UK copyright lasts for the artist’s life plus 70 years, so even under today’s rules this painting would have been free for anyone to show since 1911. The photograph is a faithful copy of a flat work, which creates no new copyright. We do not store the picture: it comes from Wikimedia Commons each time it is needed. More on this.