Caspar David Friedrich was a German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation, whose often symbolic, and anti-classical work, conveys a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings often set contemplative human figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. Art historian Christopher John Murray described their presence, in diminished perspective, amid expansive landscapes, as reducing the figures to a scale that directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension". September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840; died at 65. Alive at the same time as Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Darwin, and Ludwig van Beethoven. Wiki link