
Nature’s Emissary
Brooks Riley | Substack | 1st February 2025
Surprisingly, this is Friedrich’s first US retrospective. His acclaimed Germanic landscapes, often painted at dawn or dusk, depict figures facing away from the viewer, contemplating “the empowering essence of nature”. Romanticism was all about the feelings of an individual and Friedrich’s landscapes spoke eloquently to that. As one critic expresses it, his was an “art of experience, in which what you feel has primacy over what you see”.