In 1825, the Literary Conversation newspaper wrote about the Dresden Academy Exhibition, mentioning a  beautiful large landscape by Professor Friedrich: a solitary mountain region... splendidly depicted with varying tones across the upper mountain ranges. In the foreground, grasses and small trees cling to the towering basalt rocks. Higher up, mist curls around the desolate ridges, and at the top, the shimmering rock faces, crowned with eternal snow, glow in untarnished clarity. The solitude here is eerie; one longs to see at least an eagle or chamois—yet in vain, no life dwells here except for the air and light. Every pulse of emotion seems to falter at this height.

Caspar David Friedrich had never actually visited the Alps, yet he created several paintings of these mountains. For his iconic work The Watzmann, he used a variety of sources. A key reference was a watercolor study of the mountain’s summit captured by his pupil Johann August Heinrich, now in the National Museum of Oslo. Friedrich also drew his own sketches from travels in the Harz Mountain range. The rocky formation in the foreground was based on his drawings of the Trudenstein at Hohnekopf, near Brocken summit in June 28 1811.

Friedrich had already exhibited a large Alpine landscape in Dresden in 1824, a view of Mont Blanc, formerly at the National Gallery in Berlin, lost during the war. As The Watzmann show he borrowed styles from another artist’s drawing, of a sketch by Carl Gustav Carus. 

In Friedrich’s vision, the glacier-clad Watzmann, radiant in bright light, embodies the vastness of nature, serving as a distant symbol of divine majesty. Gentle mists hover over the ridges of the Archenkopf and Grünstein mountains below. Friedrich renders the shifting tones between green and violet. In this isolated alpine landscape, no living creatures are present. The pyramid-like composition culminates in the brilliant white of eternal ice—a concept Friedrich had explored two years earlier in his famous painting The Sea of Ice now in Hamburg Kunsthalle.

Eberhard Hanfstaengl, who acquired The Watzmann for the Berlin National Gallery, praised Friedrich’s "artistic and poetic power... in which he blends his own and others’ depictions of nature into a heightened form, transcending mere landscape painting and becoming the epitome of mountain portrayal."