“Among the landscape painters, in contrast, we find a group of Nordic artists who mirror nature with remarkable simplicity and objectivity. […] Including the above-mentioned Kaspar David Friedrich […]. Friedrich is a real phenomenon for the way he renders the misty haze of nighttime, the veiled brilliance of the stars, the eerie quality of outstretched branches, the way he shows us rain clouds racing past a megalithic tomb, or the towering clouds of the evening sky looming over ruins, and yet all of it rendered correctly, with no romantic distortion.” – Max Schmid, Kunstgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Leipzig 1904, vol. 1, p. 343.