The defining painter of German Romanticism. Friedrich's landscapes — fog-bound mountains, ruined Gothic abbeys, lone figures with their backs to the viewer — turned the natural world into a vehicle for spiritual contemplation. Largely forgotten in the second half of the 19th century, his reputation was rebuilt in the early 20th by the Symbolists and Surrealists, who recognized in him a precursor to their own interests in dream, solitude and the sublime.