The Sea of Ice

Masses of shattered ice are piled in a crushing field, a wrecked ship barely visible beneath the frozen slabs, under a pale and pitiless sky. Caspar David Friedrich composed this apocalyptic seascape around 1823–24, inspired by the fate of Arctic expeditions, and it has become the central image of nature’s sublime indifference in German Romantic painting. The picture, long known as The Wreck of Hope, stands at the far pole of the artist’s art: where his landscapes console, this one threatens, and its jagged geometry of ice is one of the most radical compositions of the century.