Caspar David Friedrich was a German painter and one of the most important figures of Romanticism. He was born on 5 September 1774 in Greifswald, Pomerania, then part of Swedish territory, the sixth of ten children of Adolf Gottlieb Friedrich, a soap boiler and candlemaker, and Sophie Dorothea Friedrich. His childhood was marked by several family losses. In 1787, when he was thirteen, his brother Johann Christoffer drowned while attempting to save Friedrich after he had fallen through the ice. From 1790 he studied drawing with Johann Gottfried Quistorp in Greifswald, and from 1794 to 1798 he studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. In 1798 he settled in Dresden, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. He gradually established a reputation for landscape drawings and sepias before turning increasingly to oil painting. Nature became the central subject of his art and a means of expressing spiritual and existential ideas. His landscapes often show solitary human figures confronted by the vastness of nature. Among his most important works are The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, The Sea of Ice, The Abbey in the Oakwood and Cross in the Mountains. In 1810 he was elected a member of the Berlin Academy and in 1816 of the Dresden Academy. In 1824 he was appointed Associate Professor of Landscape Painting at the Dresden Academy. In 1835 he suffered a stroke and subsequently painted very little, although he continued to produce drawings and watercolours. He died in Dresden on 7 May 1840. His reputation declined after his death, but his work was rediscovered in the twentieth century and he is now regarded as one of the most important landscape painters in European art.