ON A GABLE WALL IN HAMBURG’S GRUNGY dockland district stands a newly painted mural of one of the most iconic images in Western art. In other cities you might expect to see murals of famous footballers. Here, you’re confronted by Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog [3]. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is recognisable the world over — the ultimate image of the Romantic era, the lonely genius at one with nature — but few people outside Germany know much about the man who painted it.
That looks set to change. 2024 is Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th birthday, and throughout this anniversary year there are events and exhibitions all over Germany, devoted to the country’s greatest landscape painter.
The first of these exhibitions is at the Kunsthalle, in Hamburg. Most of his greatest hits are in the exhibition, but this is more than an assemblage of old favourites. This retrospective repositions Friedrich, not only as a man in tune with the spirit of his own times, but as someone who
