Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), a German romantic artist, is one of the central figures in the painting of symbolic landscapes. This piece illustrates the sublime, associated with dimensions of greatness and founded on awe and terror. These, too, are central to English romanticism. Consider, for example, Wordsworth's comment about how he "grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear" (The Prelude, 1:301-02).