A first-rate survey of Romanticism’s sublime nature mystic.

C aspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is an entire epoch in a moment — a single figure, anonymous and back to us so he’s every one of us, his thoughts his own, on top of a world swathed in fog and clouds. He’s a man as well as a monument. Nature seems to defer to him, at least compositionally, with the peaks, slopes, and mist oriented around him, but nature’s doing a striptease, too, hiding more than it shows. He’s big but finite. The sky is vast and fathomless. Defer as it might for picture-making purposes, nature has the last say in the matter of life. It doesn’t really seem to need us. Friedrich (1774–1840) painted it in 1817, while he was living and teaching in Dresden, and though the picture’s now famous, it, Friedrich, and the rest of his work were forgotten for years.

Though Two Men Contemplating the Moon and Monk by the Sea are also part of most art lovers’ visual stock, and they’re in the Met show, Friedrich is neither well known nor well understood in America, or outside Germany. Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, the Met’s new Friedrich survey, is the revelation we need on the 250th anniversary of the artist’s birth. He’s unique and unforgettable. His work is also moody, provincial, and religious, intractable and inscrutable at the same time.

Soul of Nature, which runs through May 11, is an elegantly done, succinct, 75-object survey, America’s first, for Friedrich. It covers his early, dreamy drawings, panoramic but austere, his paintings of big skies, monastic ruins, mountains, crosses in the woods, and Baltic seascapes done from the 1810s into the early 1830s, and his late drawings of old graveyards. There’s very little art by Friedrich in American collections, public or private. Outside of Germany, a critical mass is to be found only in Russia. The future Tsar Nicholas I, then a grand duke, was Friedrich’s prime patron via his grand duchess wife, the daughter of Prussia’s king. Given the war in Ukraine, art in Russian museums isn’t traveling, so the Met needed to work overtime to get German loans.

The Met calls Soul of Nature a retrospective, which it isn’t, since it’s far from comprehensive, and the catalogue is an overview. A proper Friedrich retrospective, with hundreds of objects, unfolded last year in Germany in a four-city rollout in Greifswald in Pomerania, where he was born, and Hamburg, Berlin, and Dresden. This quibble aside, Soul of Nature has to be seen.

How do you solve a problem like Friedrich? It starts with faith, specifically his Lutheran upbringing and faith. He was born in Swedish Pomerania, a slice of what’s now northern Germany, on the Baltic, where the Rügen peninsula points to Scandinavia, which was Lutheran from the 1520s. He studied art in Copenhagen and never went to Italy. Though there are no saints flying through air in his work, no martyrdoms, and no Bible stories in his work, he’s smitten from early days with the motif of a cross in the woods.

His breakout painting, The Cross in the Mountains, also called the Tetschen Altar, done around 1807, isn’t in the show, which is too bad since it aroused so much scorn. In its absence, large, monumental, brown-ink-and-wash drawings do. In one, also called The Cross in the Mountains, from 1806, a cross rises from boulders, surrounded by evergreens, with light from a sun we don’t see giving objects the look of being here but ethereally so. Friedrich’s skies are tonal and pure magic. He’s got a sure touch, too, using different pencils and different shades of wash. There are half a dozen in the show, each with its own balance of gossamer and tangible. One of Friedrich’s drawings — a procession of monks heading toward a cross shrine — won top prize in a Weimar art show judged by Goethe. He was making an impact, and making waves.

The Teschen Altar created a stir when it premiered and defined Friedrich as a new, different talent. It was a landscape view turned into a Christian altarpiece. Friedrich von Ramdohr, Dresden’s star art critic, said it was “true presumption when landscape painting wants to slink into the church and creep up on the altars.” Ouch, to be sure, but Friedrich articulated a new kind of religious feeling and expression called German nature mysticism. Faith exists in the absence of understanding and proof, and can be crafted and refined through the contemplation of nature. God exists in nature, a concept diminished during the Enlightenment, steeped as it was in reason, evidence, and analysis. To Friedrich, nature — and God — demanded imagination, emotion, and subjectivity. The inward world, honed by nature, triumphs over the outer, material world of time, commerce, work, society, and progress.

Thus was Friedrich launched. The Met’s galleries for this exhibition aren’t sequenced, really, but move smoothly and serenely from topic to topic. Nature and faith come first, then solitude, Friedrich’s travels, mist and mountains, clarity of vision, and then his spooky, morbid late work. I won’t use “sequenced,” since Friedrich’s work doesn’t change that much over 30 years.

Monk by the Sea, painted between 1808 and 1810, gets a small, strategically placed gallery of its own. Meditate from morning to midnight, Friedrich said, and “you will never comprehend, never fathom the unknowable hereafter.” We can intuit and believe and strive, but knowing is unattainable, at least in life. I suppose this can be depressing or boundless or apocalyptic if we’re tuned to disaster, but revelation isn’t necessarily disastrous. I think a more beautiful work of art is hard to find. It’s minimalist, with three horizontal bands and — not counting birds — one tiny figure, the monk, facing a black sea above which are gray clouds and then a blue sky. It’s an end-of-day picture, with stars and a faint moon in the sky. The Abbey in the Oak Wood — not in the show, alas, and originally hung, at Friedrich’s request, beneath Monk by the Sea — depicts a group of monks carrying a coffin into the ruins of an old Gothic church for a funeral and burial in a battered cemetery. Leafless oak trees with gnarled branches reach to the gray sky like greedy fingers.

Both pictures were exhibited at a Berlin art show and purchased by the king of Prussia, a coup for Friedrich and a first for what would become a settled style and repertoire. Monk by the Sea isn’t just unfussy. It’s positively spartan. He painted a group of cross pictures with a centered cross flanked by boulders behind which stand fir trees and, soaring in the distance, a Gothic church or ruins. In The Chasseur in the Forest, from 1814, a dense forest of firs soars above a single figure in snow, the trees — and nature — serving as surrogate crosses. Moonrises and sunsets in the 1820s go a step further. Sweeping skies in purple, yellow, and blue convey a universe that stills the observers. Figures are, by and large, either downright puny or small compared with the sky, landscape, or sea. Backs are almost always turned to us.

In America, the Met is Friedrich Central. In 1991, it hosted an end-of-Communism exhibition of work by Friedrich in Russian collections. While for years the only Friedrich painting owned by an American museum was at the Kimbell in Fort Worth, Texas, the Met owned drawings and prints. Friedrich died, out of fashion, in 1840. He’s his own thing but, loosely, belonged to a philosophical school embracing Goethe, Schinkel, Heine, Schlegel, lots of composers, and, among painters, Philipp Otto Runge and the Nazarenes.

As the century passed, the visual arts gained bombast. The Düsseldorf School was less enigmatic and melancholy and more ebullient. Friedrich’s work disappeared into museum vaults. It wasn’t until a 1906 Berlin blockbuster exhibition of German Romanticism that Friedrich was rediscovered. Sad to say, the Nazis co-opted him in the 1930s and ’40s as the most German of artists. He was on no American museum’s list of must-have artists. The Met’s 1991 exhibition, though small, was an eye-opener.

In 2000, the Met bought Two Men Contemplating the Moon, a gem from the late 1820s and a small version of larger pictures in Berlin and Dresden. The moon is a standard Friedrich motif, as is the old oak tree, a German emblem of heroism, resilience, and strength. Samuel Beckett said the version in Berlin inspired him to write Waiting for Godot, but don’t blame Friedrich for that.

It might have been only a coincidence that the Met put its Friedrich show next to its permanent gallery displaying fifth-century b.c. Greek pots by the Berlin Painter. Ancient Attica, I guarantee, had zero Berliners. Rather, the magnificently austere, otherwise unnamed and unknown, Berlin Painter gets his name from the pot in a Berlin museum first identified with his distinctive style. He prized balance among minimalism, usually presenting a figure like his “Kithara Player” with no clutter, no zigzags, no vine borders, but perfect scale and a luminous, glossy, black background — all packing an effective punch. In this gallery, Achilles, Ajax, Athena, Hera, and the gang from the very oldest days don’t live and breathe but loom and pull. No more effective mood setter could be found for Friedrich’s vision. I entered in a frame of mind open to timeless topics and timelessness itself.

The galleries Friedrich gets for his show might have been the only ones available. The ceilings are a bit too low, the space is heated to bread-baking temps, and The Soul of Nature should have been bigger, but we take what we can get. Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, from 1818, and the stunning, crazy Sea of Ice, a shipwreck picture from 1825, aren’t in Soul of Nature, either. There’s more than enough, though, for a master class in Friedrich. Two very beautiful, seaside nocturnes, both 8 by 12 inches, might be tiny, but they’re intense and seem titanic indeed. Friedrich’s a master of scale so even little things take our breath away.

I can’t say whether or not Friedrich carried a heavy soul with him, but spontaneity and fluidity don’t matter much to him, and neither does human action. Even in his sunsets — and sunsets change by the second — he likes things to be fixed. The Stages of Life, from 1834, is one of his last big, complex studio oils, depicting two children, a woman, a man with a top hat, facing us, for once, and an old man, back to us, on the shore, with five ships coming and going. A sunset is both brilliant and delicate, made from subtle but linear grades of color. The ships are so linear and geometric that they seem immovable. It’s about change. Generations change, people go from young to old, ships arrive and leave. What’s mutable is immutable. Friedrich’s a precise painter. He’s no Turner and no Delacroix — his English and French Romanticist peers were far more painterly, more gestural. He’s there, but not there.

In the mid-1830s, Friedrich had a stroke and retired from painting studio oils. He continued making small ink, wash, and pencil sketches, which end the exhibition. Many of these late works depict freshly dug graves. One in Soul of Nature — Cemetery in Moonlight with an Owl, from 1834 — shows an owl perched on a shovel. There’s no architecture in the scene except for other graves. The only solace is in the rising moon, the only exit is the ascension of the soul. Cave in the Harz, from 1837, is less obvious and more entrancing. Stone and moss surround a deep, dark cave, with no sky, with positive and negative space, soft and hard spots, and plenty of texture. Abstract faces seem to be carved into the rock. Was it once a quarry? Does it date from pagan times? We’re left suspended and uncertain. Such is life.