Caspar David Friedrich was an exemplary figure of German Romanticism known for his paintings of landscapes and Gothic architecture. Friedrich employed subjects such as passing ships, isolated figures, and glowing light as esoteric symbols of mortality, as seen in his paintings Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) and The Stages of Life (1835). “All authentic art is conceived at a sacred moment and nourished in a blessed hour; an inner impulse creates it, often without the artist being aware of it,” he once reflected. Born on September 5, 1774 in Greifswald, Germany, seeing the death of his mother and siblings as child, haunted Friedrich through adulthood. Entering the University of Greifswald in 1790, he studied under Johann Gottfried Quistorp, who often brought his students into the open countryside to draw from life. The young artist began taking landscape sketching tours of forests, mountains, and beaches around Northern Europe during the 1790s. In the decades that followed, Friedrich’s paintings and drawings were purchased by royalty in Germany as well as Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. By 1830, interest in his work and Romanticism had waned, leading Friedrich to become increasingly solitary and paranoid of other people. Suffering a stroke that left him partially paralyzed in 1835, he was living in poverty when he died on May 7, 1840 in Dresden, Germany. Despite his career faltering late in life, Friedrich’s work influenced several generations of artists, including the Hudson River School painters, Mark Rothko, and the contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Louvre Museum in Paris, and the National Gallery in London, among others.