Mountains in the Rising Fog

Caspar David Friedrich

Oil on canvas

Hamburger Kunsthalle

Mountains in the Rising Fog (German: Gebirge bei aufsteigendem Nebel) is a late oil painting by Caspar David Friedrich in which the viewer's gaze moves across a spruce-covered hillside and valley to settle on a softly rendered mountain range dissolving into ascending mist. Unusually for Friedrich, the composition dispenses with an immediate foreground, uniting the middle ground and distance into a single continuous terrain—believed to derive from sketches of the Rosenberg in Bohemian Switzerland. Friedrich (1774–1840), the foremost painter of German Romanticism, combined close observation of nature with a deeply subjective, spiritual vision, rendering landscape as an expression of feeling rather than mere topography. The painting is considered one of Friedrich's last significant works; it is thought to have been left incomplete following the stroke the artist suffered in 1835 that impaired his right hand.