Rotating exhibition
More about – Painters!
This room holds exactly one picture at a time. Plus the person who painted it, and the story the museum label leaves out. Then we rehang.
On the wall now
Caspar David Friedrich
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
The story behind the picture
Germany’s most famous back
A man in a dark coat stands on a rock and looks out over a sea of fog. That is all that happens. And yet you know this picture – from book covers, posters and quite possibly a coffee mug.
Here is the thing: this view does not exist. Caspar David Friedrich assembled it in his Dresden studio from sketches he had made while hiking in Sächsische Schweiz – Saxon Switzerland, the sandstone hills upriver. He drew the rock under the man’s boots on 3 June 1813 at the foot of a table mountain called the Kaiserkrone; the flat-topped Zirkelstein was moved into the distance on the right. Germany’s best-known landscape is a collage.
Nor was it well known for long. After Friedrich’s day the painting’s trail goes cold for some 120 years. It resurfaces in a Berlin gallery in 1939 and has hung in Hamburg since 1970. Nobody knows who the man is. He has never turned round.
Painter
A Pomeranian in Dresden
Caspar David Friedrich, born in Greifswald in 1774, died in Dresden in 1840. At least 19 trips into Saxon Switzerland are on record.
Picture
A back, not a face
The figure seen from behind is Friedrich’s trademark: we don’t look at the man. We look at what he sees.
Trail
Walk it yourself
The Malerweg, the Painters’ Way, runs for 116 kilometres through Saxon Switzerland. The rock at the Kaiserkrone is real. The fog takes luck.
Hanging plan
What goes on the wall next
We begin with the Romantics – the years in which Germany learned to see itself as a landscape.
Caspar David Friedrich
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
Germany’s most famous view – which never existed.
Adrian Zingg
View through a Rock Arch towards Hohnstein Castle
A Swiss artist draws Saxony – and suddenly Saxony has a Switzerland.
Coming up
Philipp Otto Runge
The Hülsenbeck Children
Three children at eye level – by a man who also handed the Brothers Grimm two fairy tales.
Coming up
Friedrich Overbeck
Italia and Germania
Two friends who are really two countries – and a promise kept to a dead friend.
Coming up
Karl Friedrich Schinkel
Gothic Cathedral by the Water
A cathedral that never existed – in a painting long mistaken for a copy.
Coming up
Johan Christian Dahl
View of Dresden by Moonlight
Dresden by moonlight – by the Norwegian who lived one floor above Caspar David Friedrich.
Coming up
Ludwig Richter
Crossing the Elbe at the Schreckenstein
A boat, a castle, a harp – the moment a painter stopped dreaming of Italy.
Coming up
Carl Spitzweg
The Poor Poet
Germany’s favourite starving artist – stolen twice, once as a work of art.
Coming up
Way out
Just one picture?
Yes. But one you will remember. The next is already leaning against the wall.