Age Of Enlightenment

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a new movement took place in the culture that would supersede the Age of Enlightenment. This new movement would reestablish the intellectual, artist, and literacy values in the culture of the period. The preceding movement of the Age of Reason possessed a more academic foundation compared to the more modern, emotionally based culture of Romanticism. The shift from a more intellectual based culture to a more emotional based culture was due to a rapidly changing culture that had not been seen before. A rather large contributing factor to this changing culture, was the increase of industrialization occurring in the nineteenth century. This rise of industrialization caused large percentages of the population

These terrible living conditions of a large proportion of the population lead people to look for a way to get an escape from their disagreeable style of life. This desire to find an escape from this lifestyle led to many of the defining characteristics of Romanticism.
With the culture promptly changing, the values of the previous movements began to not appeal to the population and the new values began to become adapted to the culture. Artist began to become more focused on the ability to create and express intense emotional feelings onto their artworks. Artists such as the German painter Caspar David Friedrich boldly states that “the artist’s feeling is his law”. This movement was not solely limited to painters, for poet William Wordsworth says that poetry should begin “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. This expression of feelings across many medians led to a common occurrence in

Therefore, romantics regularly used nature as a subject for their median. With this in mind, many artist sought out to find and capture this moment in some way. One such painter was the German landscape artist, Caspar David Friedrich. Friedrich painted multiple paintings that dealt with nature, but one that stands out is Wanderer Above Sea of Fog. In this painting he depicts a man standing on a mountain peak with the valleys below full of fog, giving the illusion of a “sea” of fog. He truly captures the essence of the desire to portray nature in an exotic state that is profound to experience. The viewer can just image the emotion that one would experience in a scene like this in a firsthand encounter. The figure that is standing on top of the mountain has a unique significance to the picture, for that person is a portrait of Friedrich himself. Friedrich applied a portrait of himself because it allowed him to be able to apply self-expression. Friedrich was passionate about self- expression, so much so that he himself states that he continued to stress that the very idea of “self-expression” had to be associated with the physical and social isolation”(Wanderer). This statement by Friedrich himself gives the realization that this is exactly what Friedrich has accomplished, isolating himself at the top of a mountain away from any civilization or