Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, painted around 1818, is arguably the most famous silhouette in art history, yet it went missing for a century and did not reach a public museum until 1970. This episode uses the painting as a biographical lens on Friedrich himself: a devout Lutheran who believed nature was his cathedral, a liberal nationalist in a censored Germany, and a landscape painter who stitched together sketches from three different locations into one impossible panorama.

We unpack the rear-facing figure technique that pulls viewers into the wanderer’s shoes, the red-haired self-portrait painted in the happiest year of his life, and the dark green altdeutsch coat that scholars read as a banned political statement about German unification. We also explore his friendship with scientist Carl Gustav Carus, whose reading of Genesis reframes the fog as the divine engine of creation, and the rediscovery of the painting in a Berlin gallery in 1939.

• Why the composition works like a third-person video game camera
• Which real peaks, the Zirkelstein and Kaiserkrone among them, were remixed into the scene
• Friedrich’s contempt for landscapes he called curiosity shops, and his contrast with Delacroix
• How the missing middle distance makes the painting a precursor to surrealism
• How Robert Macfarlane credits Friedrich with inventing the archetype of the visionary mountain climber