Caspar David Friedrich was the most purely Romantic of German landscape painters, and in his vision of the great forests one of the purest of European Romantics.

He was trained in Copenhagen and never went to Italy - he said that he was afraid he would never want to return if he ever saw Rome. He was particularly interested in the expression of effects of light and of the seasons, but his feeling for the haunted silence of the woods has no parallel outside Altdorfer. David d'Angers, who met him in Dresden in 1834, said he 'discovered the tragedy of landscape'. In 1808 he exhibited the Cross in the Mountains (Dresden), which was painted as an altarpiece for a private chapel, although it has no specifically religious subject-matter. It started a debate over the suitability of landscapes for religious purposes: in fact, all Friedrich's pictures of this kind are landscapes with pantheistic implications, and not 'religious' subjects at all. He spent most of his life in Dresden, where he knew Runge.

Most of his works are in German museums, especially Dresden, but others are in Fort Worth Texas, London (NG), Paris (Louvre), St petersburg and Vienna.

Source: The Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists (Penguin Reference Books)