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It is possible to overrate the density of Friedrich's allegories. There is, for example, a German critic's claim that the rock against which the little traveler in Landscape with Rainbow (circa 1809) is leaning is really "the symbol of faith" and that his hat on the ground is "a sign of humility." But often the symbolism is plain enough, as in a well-known picture usually called The Wreck of the "Hope" (circa 1822). Friedrich was inspired, at first, by reports of early expeditions to the North Pole, all of which failed. But the image he produced, with its grinding slabs of travertine-colored floe ice chewing up a wooden ship, goes beyond documentary into allegory: the frail bark of human aspiration crushed by the world's immense and glacial indifference. "The ice in the north must look very different from that," Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia is said to have grumped on viewing this picture. He was right, though it scarcely matters. Friedrich's shipwreck survives as one of the most remarkable images of "sublimity" in all 19th century painting.
Ethical Teacher. In treating landscape as a paradigm of human fate and mood, Friedrich became one of the few major painters in the German romantic movement. The issue then, as posed by the philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, was straightforward: "Do not animals, stones, plants, stars and breezes also belong with mankind, which is merely a central meeting point of countless varied threads? Can mankind be understood divorced from nature, and is it so very different from other manifestations of nature?" This, the key question of the romantic sensibility then as of ecology now, was Friedrich's obsession. He pursued it through a full gamut of subject —from beetling ice crags and the white chalk abysses of Rugen Island down to the plains, flooded in a benediction of yellow light, which were his equivalent for Paradise. "On the day he is painting air," Friedrich's wife said to a friend, "he may not be spoken to!"
To Friedrich, nature was an ethical teacher, a repository of religious experience. And when he found his pictures widely ignored (he was not a success in the marketplace), he succumbed to an almost paranoid embitterment, watching "realist" landscape triumph over his ideal form of it in the 1830s. For the naturalists, Friedrich had one last word. "If [the artist] sees nothing within him," he wrote, "then he should also refrain from painting what he sees before him. Otherwise his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which"—startling phrase—"one expects to find only the sick or the dead."