Friedrich's painting works by what he denies the viewer. The figure's face is turned away. The valley is consumed in fog. The mountain ridge in the middle distance breaks the surface only enough to confirm there is something underneath. The painting refuses two acts at once: the portrait (we cannot see who the man is) and the landscape (we cannot see what he sees).

What remains, when both have been refused, is the stance. The walking stick is planted. The body is half-turned three-quarters into the wind. The hair does not blow. The painter has held the moment outside weather. We are looking at a portrait of attention, not of personality, and at a landscape of presence, not of place.

The instinct of later Romanticism was to soften this into mood, and the instinct of Modernism after it was to deny that anything had cohered. Both readings are too generous to themselves and not generous enough to Friedrich. Stand in front of the canvas long enough, twenty minutes rather than five, and the picture stops being about the mountain and starts being about the standing. The fog moves slightly. The figure does not.