Mountain Landscape with Rainbow (1809-10), is an oil painting and 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, one of the main features of Friedrich's style. He was famously quote to have said:
"The artist should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees in himself."
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 moonbow forms in the waning light.
A moonbow (also known as a lunar rainbow or white rainbow), is a rainbow produced by moonlight rather than sunlight. Other than the difference in light source, its formation is exactly the same as for a solar rainbow: It is caused by the refraction of light in many water droplets, such as a rain shower or a waterfall, and is always positioned in the opposite part of the sky from the moon relative to the observer.
Moonbows are much fainter than solar rainbows, due to the smaller amount of light reflected from the surface of the moon. Because the light is usually too faint to excite the cone color receptors in human eyes, it is difficult for the human eye to discern colors in a moonbow. As a result, a moonbow often appears to be white. However, the colors in a moonbow do appear in long exposure photographs.
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.
Friedrich had a strict Lutheran upbringing permeating through to his paintings which frequently showed religious landscapes and carried notions of salvation through religion amongst other themes.
Excerpt from Ch. 11The Worship of Nature, Civilisation by Kenneth Clark:
Although the worship of nature had its dangers, the prophets of the new religion were earnest and even pious men whose whole aim was to prove that their goddess was respectable, and even moral. They achieved this curious intellectual feat by approximating nature and truth. Far the greatest man to apply his mind to this exercise was Goethe. The word 'nature' appears throughout his work - on almost every page of his theoretical and critical writings - and is claimed as the ultimate sanction for all his judgements. It is true that Goethe's Nature is slightly different from Rousseau's Nature. He meant by it not how things seem, but how things work if they are not interfered with. He saw all living things - and he was a distinguished botanist who made his own drawings of the plants that he observed - as striving for fuller development through an infinitely long process of adaptation. I might almost say that he believed in the gradual civilisation of plants and animals. It was the point of view that was later to lead to Darwin and the theory of evolution. But this analytic and philosophic approach to nature had less immediate effect on people's minds than the purely inspirational approach of the English Romantic poets, Coleridge and Wordsworth.
Coleridge looked at nature in the high mystical manner. This is how he addressed the Swiss mountains in his 'Hymn Before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni' :
O dread and silent mount ! I gazed upon thee.
Till thou, still present to the bodily sense,
Didst vanish from my thought : entranced in prayer
I worshipped the Invisible alone.
Very Germanic, and best illustrated by a German landscape painter, Caspar David Friedrich. I have often wondered if this great artist was known to Coleridge, their outlooks are so similar.
Wordsworth's approach to nature was religious in the moral Anglican manner.
'Accuse me not,' he said, 'of arrogance'
If having walk'd with Nature
And offered, as far as frailty would allow.
My heart a daily sacrifice to truth I now affirm of Nature and of Truth That their Divinity Revolts offended at the ways of men.
That nature should be shocked by human behaviour does seem to me rather nonsense. But one mustn't lightly accuse Wordsworth of arrogance or silliness. By the time he wrote those lines he had lived through a great deal. As a young man he went to France, lived with a spirited French girl and had a daughter
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