Surely you have seen him. He’s a sturdy blond man in a sharp blue suit, standing at the edge of the world. Perched atop a rocky peak after a presumably long journey, aided in part by a walking stick, he surveys the misty expanse before him. There’s something about this guy. His back to the viewer, he seems to be going places.

Though Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog may be a familiar image, the painting has never found its way over the Atlantic until now. The 1817 canvas is the centerpiece of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature.” Featuring more than 75 paintings and works on paper, it’s by far the most comprehensive selection of Friedrich’s work ever to visit the United States. The occasion is the continued celebration of the painter’s 250th birthday, which began last year in Germany with major exhibitions in Hamburg and Dresden and over 150 events in Friedrich’s hometown of Greifswald.

“The Soul of Nature” culminates the Met’s decades-long effort to familiarize American audiences with the Romantic landscape painter’s mastery. (Only two prior exhibitions of his work have ever occurred stateside, and both were hosted by the Met.) “The Soul of Nature” firmly asserts Friedrich as a prescient and visionary painter: His rocky cliffs, crumbling ruins, and scraggly forests in particular feel poignant today as the physical world he attempted to capture—the ultimate witness to the passage of time—continues to transform in worrisome ways. Beset by war, industrialization, and fanaticism, the inner world he tried to cultivate in his canvases could hardly keep up. And Friedrich’s ubiquitous Wanderer remains relevant more than 200 years after its paint dried: Through the fog, we hope to find truth, stability, escape, and maybe even peace.

Friedrich was born in 1774 in Greifswald, a city in Western Pomerania then under the domain of the Swedish crown. The son of a soap boiler and candlemaker, Friedrich left home in 1794 to attend Copenhagen’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied figural drawing in the classical tradition. In the spring of 1798, he dropped out and moved to Dresden, where he would reside until his death in 1840.

The artistically inclined Saxon capital was home to a number of painters who captured the areas surrounding the Elbe Sandstone Mountains on what is now the German-Czech border. Equipped with modern innovations like wove paper newly imported from England and the powdered-graphite and clay pencil, Friedrich would head into the forest and fill notebooks with detailed sketches of individual trees, plants, rocks, and ruins. He preferred to be alone during these excursions. Solitude, he once told the Russian poet Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky, was essential to his conversations with nature: “To be what I am, I must devote myself to the world around me, become one with my clouds and cliffs.”

By the early 1800s, Friedrich was combining these sketches into composite imaginary landscapes that were then lightly washed with brown ink, creating careful and precise tonal gradations that dramatized differing scales of light and shadow. One of the Met’s examples of this sepia work, The Cross in the Mountains (1806), shows a crucifixion scene backlit by a radiant sun. The trees and rocky peaks that burst forth from the foreground are rendered as silhouettes, their flatness intensified by the monochromatic ink wash. The vertical cross is almost an afterthought in the remaining pictorial space, which is dominated by a soft sky. Two years later, Friedrich’s work courted controversy after a full-color, oil-paint version of this scene was incorporated into an altarpiece—one critic, offended by the presentation of landscape as sacred object, accused such works as wanting to “slink into the church and creep up on the altars.” But by placing this Passion scene in the most naturalistic of locales, Friedrich portrays the loneliness of Christ’s self-sacrifice and situates the hopes of salvation within the landscape itself.

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His contemporaries in England—J.M.W. Turner and John Constable—turned stormy seascapes and cloudy skies into powerful expressions of emotion; they were just as interested in reimagining landscape art as a highly subjective enterprise. But in contrast to the intensity invoked by Turner’s dynamic brushwork, Friedrich’s more restrained, subtle works invite contemplation, appealing to the eye, heart, and mind in equal measure. One highlight is The Ruins of Oybin (1812), which depicts a crumbling monastery. A watercolor study of it from two years prior shows the creative liberties Friedrich took when representing the scene in oil: The three windows have been vertically elongated, while a crucifix leans against the left-hand wall and an altar table now resides in the middle of the frame. The impression of stillness contrasts with the passage of time implied by the plants that sprout from the ruins and the warm glow of a changing sun. The message is clear: Existence is fleeting, but nature (and faith) endure.

Friedrich was bored with the strict limitations imposed on painters of the natural world, believing that landscape art, as it had been practiced by earlier generations, did not do enough to stimulate the viewer’s individual imagination. The artist’s true vocation, he felt, was to capture the spiritual dimensions of these cliffs and ice floes and forests, to depict the heights of his private emotional experience on the canvas: “The task of a work of art is to recognize the spirit of nature and, with one’s whole heart and intention, to saturate oneself with it and absorb it and give it back again in the form of a picture.”

The Met’s earliest display of Friedrich’s transformation from curious draftsman to transcendental painter is Monk by the Sea (1808–10). The canvas is divided into horizontal bands: a grassy dune, a dark, choppy sea, and a swirling sky. The scene is thick with fog, and slightly off-center stands a small cloaked figure facing the sea. Originally, Friedrich had included several boats on the ocean, but the final painting lacks any markers of perspective or repoussoirs, a framing device to guide the eye. Such minimalism, unprecedented at the time, emphasizes two scales: the seemingly infinite expanse of nature and the smallness of man within it. The painting is profoundly lonely and shockingly modern.

The sociopolitical backdrop to Friedrich’s romantic musings was the ongoing Napoleonic Wars. Friedrich was a liberal nationalist long before the existence of a German state; he dismissed those peers who emigrated elsewhere, “no longer satisfied with our German sun, moon and stars, with our rocks, trees and plants, with our plains, lakes and rivers.” Patriotism infused each of his paintings, but never overtly. In 1813, the year the war came to Dresden’s doorstep, Friedrich was working on a rare exception. The foreground of The Chasseur in the Forest shows a raven perched on a chopped-down tree and a tiny figure confronting the depths of a wintry wood. A majority of the canvas is occupied by a towering wall of fir trees, again playing with symbolism and scale to convey man’s essential relationship to the world at large, as but a small part of the larger whole. When the piece was exhibited in Berlin in 1814—at the time titled Snowy Fir Forest—the peaking anti-French sentiment led some to interpret this warrior figure as a chasseur, a member of the French light cavalry.

In peacetime, after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Friedrich entered a prolific period that would last until 1835, when he had a stroke and largely ceased painting in oils. (He would die five years later.) The best of his works from this period feature a Rückenfigur, a person seen from behind. As there is no hint of his expression, the viewer’s eye is naturally drawn to whatever the Rückenfigur is observing. Museum visitors are, in their own way, wandering Rückenfiguren, which imbues the experience of “The Soul of Nature” with an uncanny sense of distance throughout as one observes people looking at paintings of people observing the natural world. Those who do not pause to ponder miss the chance to connect with the emotion imbued in Friedrich’s pensive figures.

Case in point: Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1825–30) features a pair paused on a steep path bursting with roots and rocks. One holds a walking stick and supports the other while they both consider a distant sickle moon, which is finely rendered in blushing light-pink paint. Unlike some of Friedrich’s other wanderers, these figures reveal details that contribute to the landscape’s symbolism. The men are dressed—illegally—in the traditional German garb adopted by radical students in opposition to postwar conservative politics. Contemporary sources have identified these city dwellers enjoying a countryside stroll as the artist and his younger colleague, August Heinrich. It turns out that existential contemplation is better with a friend!

On the afternoon that I visited “The Soul of Nature,” I was eager to commune with this miniature masterpiece, relocated from its usual home on the second floor. I recalled a lyric from the Microphones’ 2001 song “The Moon”: “There’s nothing left except certain death / And that was comforting at night out under the moon.” And that led me back to an astute remark by the late Anthony Bourdain: “To sit alone or with a few friends, half-drunk under a full moon, you just understand how lucky you are.” (It’s true!) Friedrich’s wanderers, humbled by that sliver of light, were in pursuit of a simple pleasure; perhaps we all should follow their example and pause to appreciate the night sky more regularly. Yet as I stood there, lost in thought, another patron paused in front of the piece, blew a raspberry, and shuffled along. I was dumbstruck, but also delighted—Friedrich, I think, would be tickled by the contradicting feelings he could inspire.

Elsewhere, a pair of small works featuring the artist’s wife, Caroline Bommer, explore motifs of turning inward by turning outward. In Woman at the Window (1822), Bommer leans out of an open window at the artist’s studio and gazes across to the opposite shore of the Elbe River. Friedrich rarely painted interiors, and the starkness of this one intensifies the woman’s longing for the natural world, indicated by treetops and the mast of a ship. The contemporaneous painting Woman Before the Rising or Setting Sun shows a woman standing at the edge of a golden field, arms outstretched, palms open and upturned. The light is blocked by her silhouette, so faint sunbeams emanate from her chest in a radial pattern that nicely complements her spiky hairpiece. One does not need to see the woman’s face to understand that she is aglow, communing with a profound radiance.

Aesthetic taste had shifted away from Friedrich’s reverential naturalism by the late 1820s, and aristocratic patrons gravitated toward more unambiguous styles. Especially popular were the idealized landscapes emerging from the Düsseldorf School and the biblical scenes made by the Nazarenes, a group of semi-monastic art students painting in a historical style. When he eventually regained dexterity after his stroke, Friedrich returned to sepia, the medium of his youth, creating stark drawings of tombs and graveyards punctuated by birds of prey. He died impoverished, cast off as a strange subplot in the history of art.

Friedrich was reappraised at the turn of the 20th century as the fondness for landscapes and spiritual imagery returned. Ninety-three of his paintings and drawings were included in the 1906 German Centenary Exhibition at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie, and his treatment of light and color was framed as having anticipated Impressionism. His American breakthrough arrived 30 years later, when he was featured in a traveling survey covering 500 years of German art. The timing of the exhibition was unfortunate: Back in Europe, Adolf Hitler was extolling Romantic painters as part of a lineage of “true German art.” In the “Soul of Nature” catalog, the art historian Cordula Grewe points out that Hitler was at least a little uncomfortable with how the contemplative ideals of Romanticism clashed with militant nationalism and fascism. Nonetheless, this association poisoned the reception of Friedrich’s work until the 1960s, when the art historian Robert Rosenblum argued that Friedrich’s paintings, particularly Monk by the Sea, presaged radical painters like Mark Rothko, who used color and abstraction to evoke the sublime.

Much like that of the Abstract Expressionists, Friedrich’s work remains resistant to narrow interpretation. There’s little narrative hand-holding, and the Rückenfigur can only do so much by way of emotional storytelling. As the critic Peter Schjeldahl once wrote of Friedrich’s work, “The pictures don’t give; they take.” Which brings us back to our wanderer: He may have reached the top of the mountain, but the vision remains unclear. And so where does that leave us? Just looking over the shoulder of someone standing at the precipice? I don’t know, and the Rückenfigur is not about to turn around and tell you what to look at. It will, however, invite you to see yourself.