Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) Germany

Caspar David Friedrich was a nineteenth-century landscape painter, who is now considered the most important artist of the German Romantic movement. His works focused on the contemplation of nature, and often depict figures against a background of tempestuous skies or dusk landscapes, as in his most famous work, Wanderer Against a Sea of Fog (1818).
He is credited with establishing the Romantic movement in landscape painting, which emphasized spiritualism and the power of nature, as well as raising the prestige of landscape as a genre. He had significant success in his lifetime and enjoyed the support of a number of royal patrons, but later in life he fell out of favour, and died in obscurity.
His works regained popularity in the 20th century, beginning with a major exhibition in Berlin in 1906, but his works became associated with German nationalism during the 1930s, when Friedrich’s work was used to promote Nazi ideology. Today he is considered to be the finest and most influential painter of the Romantic movement, and his works hang in major galleries in Germany and further afield.