Mountain Landscape with Rainbow (1809-10) (German: Gebirgslandschaft mit Regenbogen), is an oil painting by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. Like the Riesengebirge Landscape (1810) this painting was inspired by Friedrich's 1809 travels through Germany and along the shores of the Baltic Sea. The observation of nature in his travels allowed Friedrich to compose a universal, idyllic landscape that is visionary rather than literal.
In the foreground a wayfarer has stopped to rest. He turns his gaze to the background, where a black abyss opens up. In those depths a few mountains can be glimpsed. Above the landscape, a rainbow forms in the waning light.
In Friedrich's oeuvre, paintings with a sharp contrast between the foreground and background are common, a separation symbolizing the spiritual and physical planes of existence. So it is in this painting: in the foreground the sun illuminates the foliage and the clothes of the traveller, and in contrast the darkness of night fills the rest of the image. The opposites of day and night, and of spirit and matter, are unified by a rainbow, which in the Genesis account of Noah's ark symbolized the covenant between God and humanity.
Famous quotes containing the words mountain, landscape and/or rainbow:
“Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks the wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)