Caspar David Friedrich treated snow as a language for faith, death and survival. From the discarded crutches of 1811 to a lone oak in 1829, here is a guide to his winter landscapes and the one that was lost.

One subject, six movements. Follow the dogs in famous paintings from Van Eyck to Seurat and you learn to spot Northern Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Romanticism, Impressionism and Pointillism at a glance.

A god eating his child on the wall of a dining room, a severed head painted on a parade shield, skeletons tending a garden: eight paintings that have unsettled viewers for centuries, and what their painters meant by them.

A burial in the snow, a ruined Gothic church and a grove of dead oaks: Caspar David Friedrich painted The Abbey in the Oakwood as the dark companion to The Monk by the Sea.

Between 1793 and 1867 five French and Spanish paintings changed what political subject matter could look like in Western canvas painting. The five — David's Death of Marat, Goya's Third of May 1808, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, Courbet's Stone Breakers, and Manet's Execution of Maximilian — together form the load-bearing seventy-four-year sequence in which Western political painting moved from Neoclassical allegory to documentary Realism.

Gustave Courbet painted The Stone Breakers in autumn 1849 in his studio at Ornans, a small village in the Doubs valley of eastern France. The 165 × 257 centimetre oil-on-canvas showed two figures breaking stones beside a country road for the construction of the Ornans-Pontarlier rural highway. The painting was the central exhibit in Courbet's 1849-50 Paris Salon and was the inaugural document of the French Realism movement.

Eugène Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People between October and December 1830, three months after the Three Glorious Days of the July Revolution (27-29 July 1830) that overthrew King Charles X of France. The 260 × 325 centimetre oil-on-canvas hangs in the Paris collection that purchased it from the Salon of 1831 for 3,000 francs.

Francisco de Goya painted Saturn Devouring His Son directly onto the dining-room wall of his country house, the Quinta del Sordo, outside Madrid in 1819-1823. It was one of fourteen 'Black Paintings' Goya made on the interior walls of the house in the last four years of his Spanish residency. He never signed them, never titled them, never exhibited them, and almost certainly never intended anyone outside his immediate household to see them.

Caspar David Friedrich finished The Monk by the Sea in 1810 in his Dresden studio. The canvas is 110 by 172 centimetres and contains, in terms of actual painted content, almost nothing: a narrow strip of pale beach at the bottom, a wider band of dark Baltic Sea in the middle, an enormous expanse of cloudy grey sky filling the upper two-thirds, and a single small figure of a Capuchin monk standing on the beach in left profile, dressed in a brown robe.

Caspar David Friedrich painted Two Men Contemplating the Moon in his Dresden studio in 1819 — a small canvas of two cloaked figures standing on a forest path before a fallen oak, looking up at a crescent moon rising over the trees. Samuel Beckett saw the painting at the Dresden gallery in 1937 and named it, almost forty years later, as the direct visual source for the staging of Waiting for Godot.

Western painting changed in seven clear steps between 1509 and 1866, from the Renaissance and Baroque to Realism and Impressionism. A short guide to each.

From a single candle to a low moon on wet stone, eight masters between 1640 and 1897 found different answers to one problem: how do you make darkness visible?

Turner painted the killing storm, Aivazovsky the moment of survival, Sorolla the blaze of noon, Krøyer the pale northern dusk: seven canvases, seven faces of the sea.

Caspar David Friedrich's Das Eismeer (The Sea of Ice, 1823-24) is the most uncompromising painting in the German Romantic canon: a wrecked ship buried under a pyramid of shattered Arctic ice, painted in Dresden from sketches of the Elbe river breaking up in winter. A close reading of the composition, the Parry expedition that inspired it, the painting's link to Monk by the Sea and Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, and the work's twentieth-century afterlife.

Between 1803 and 1805 William Blake took a single passage from the Book of Revelation and turned it into a monster. The Great Red Dragon watercolours, four sheets made for the patron Thomas Butts, gave prophecy a body, a turned back, and a will, and they remain among the most frightening images the age of Romanticism produced.

Eight images from William Blake’s private mythology, from the compass-wielding creator of The Ancient of Days to the Red Dragon of Revelation and the tiny gold-flecked Ghost of a Flea. What each vision shows, how Blake made it, and where each fits in the strangest career in British art.

Francisco Goya worked through fifty years of Spanish history, from cheerful tapestry cartoons for the royal palace in 1777 to the Black Paintings he applied directly to the walls of his country house in 1820. Across the same career he was court painter to four successive kings, a witness to the French invasion, a publisher of satirical etchings, a portraitist of the most fashionable women in Madrid, and the inventor of the modern picture of fear.

Caspar David Friedrich painted a single subject for forty years — the human figure, usually small, usually seen from behind, standing in a landscape too large to contain. The figure is alone. The landscape is the argument. Eight paintings from the German Romantic painter whose pictures have become shorthand for solitude itself.

Before Goya, European painters showed war as triumph. After Goya, they could no longer pretend. The Third of May 1808 ended the heroic battle picture and invented the painting of senseless violence — a tradition that runs through Manet, Picasso, and every photograph of war we have made since.

Between roughly 1800 and 1850, European painters turned away from order, reason, and the antique line and toward weather, ruin, revolution, and solitude. A reader's guide to the painters who built the Romantic image.