As I was looking at Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog in one of the earlier posts on this blog, the sort of romantic wandering depicted in the painting really reminded me of some of the poetry we had read by Wordsworth. To me, the vastness of the landscape that Friedrich depicts, very mysterious and unknown, and the wanderer's relationship to this nature is reminiscent of the kind of nurturing, almost religious relationship that Wordsworth talks about in his Prelude. Friedrich himself was a deeply religious man as well as a Romantic, and so in his paintings he often references the glory of God through his depiction of landscapes—which I think is definitely apparent in the mystery and vastness of the world that he presents in this painting. The idea of the wanderer is also something that Wordsworth touches on in “Tintern Abbey”, which has that sort of “in between” and wandering feel in both the speaker’s state of mind as well as in the language. And yet, this wandering leads the speaker to important insights about nature, life and memory, which could be reflected in the Friedrich painting: while we cannot see the wanderer’s face, his head appears to be downturned as he surveys the landscape, standing on the precipice of the cliff, most likely contemplating the beauty and magnificence the scene before him and noting his own smallness in the face of it all. This idea of the wanderer, as displayed by Friedrich and Wordsworth, is something that would be carried throughout Victorian art and culture for the next century, with works such as William Morris’s Earthly Paradise, in which a group of wanderers who have been expelled from their war-torn city act as the main speakers, touching on this feeling of “in between” that permeated British society at this time.
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