Friedrich rarely painted directly from a single observed scene. He made detailed pencil and sepia-wash studies of specific places, then combined and reworked elements from different studies back in his studio to build an entirely composed, often partly invented view, a practice documented in paintings such as Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, where a real rock formation appears relocated from its actual site to suit the composition^[2]. This habit of assembly rather than transcription meant that a recognisable landscape type, a ruined church, a bare winter tree, a solitary figure seen from behind, could recur across several canvases without any one of them being a literal record of a place Friedrich had actually stood in front of. It also meant that closely related paintings, sharing a season, a format or a mood, were a normal part of his practice rather than an anomaly.

Friedrich trained at the Academy in Copenhagen and settled in Dresden for the rest of his career, developing a body of landscapes built around meditative figures, trees and ruins set against expansive skies, each charged with his own spiritual response to the natural world rather than straightforward description^[1]. His winter subjects fit this pattern closely: a bare, stripped landscape gave him a natural way to picture hardship and mortality, while a distant source of light, whether a break in the clouds, a rising moon or a hint of dawn, offered the promise of something beyond it. Friedrich's contemporaries in the German Romantic circle, including the philosopher-poets influenced by Spinoza's pantheism, understood this kind of landscape less as denominational religious painting than as a philosophical meditation on the relationship between the individual and the immensity of the natural world^[4].

Friedrich's first major oil painting, The Cross in the Mountains, exhibited in 1808, provoked real controversy for being the first Christian altarpiece composed as a landscape rather than a figural scene, and it set the pattern for the rest of his career: an artist who found ways to smuggle profound spiritual content into pictures that, on their surface, showed only trees, ruins and weather^[1]. He was celebrated early in his career but came to be seen as outdated as the nineteenth century moved on, and he died in relative obscurity. His reputation did not recover until the century's end, when Symbolist painters and critics rediscovered his work and reclaimed him as a major figure, a rehabilitation that has continued into how his winter landscapes are read and valued today^[1].