In the winter of 1787 a thirteen-year-old boy watched his younger brother drown beneath the ice of a frozen lake in northern Germany, reportedly while trying to pull him to safety. That boy was Caspar David Friedrich, and this episode explores how a childhood defined by relentless loss became the beating heart of a body of work that turned landscape painting from visual wallpaper into a psychological and spiritual mirror, inventing the visual language of the sublime that still shapes fog-drenched cinema today.

We follow Friedrich from Greifswald through the theology of Kosegarten, the rigid neoclassicism of the Copenhagen Academy, and his settlement in Dresden, where he sketched on solitary hikes and then painted from memory months or years later. We unpack the 1808 Tetschen Altar scandal and the critic Ramdohr's attack, the Rückenfigur tec ...