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.

Caspar David Friedrich finished The Monk by the Sea in 1810 and showed it at the Berlin Academy that autumn. It was unlike any landscape painting Europe had ever seen. A flat shore. A flat sea. A flat sky that fills two-thirds of the canvas. One tiny figure of a Capuchin monk standing on the dune, looking out. No frame within the frame, no foreground tree, no Claudian arrangement of distance, no ruin, no storm. Just three horizontal bands and a man. Visitors complained. The p

Francisco Goya painted Saturn Devouring His Son between 1819 and 1823, in oil applied directly to the plaster wall of the dining room of his house outside Madrid. He was in his seventies, deaf for thirty years, recovering from a near-fatal illness, and living alone in a country property called the Quinta del Sordo — the House of the Deaf Man. He did not sign the painting. He did not title it. He did not intend it to be seen. Saturn is one of fourteen pictures Goya painted on

Searching for Francisco Goya's The Coven? This is the painting: a Black Painting from 1821-1823, a Devil in goat form presiding over a circle of witches, painted directly onto Goya's own dining-room wall. What the painting shows, why he painted it, and how to bring the fine print home.

A man in a white shirt throws his arms wide before a firing squad on a hill above Madrid. Goya painted the night six years after it happened — and built every modern war painting that came after.

A young woman in white drifts down the river toward Camelot in a small wooden boat, chains slipping from her hands, candles guttering. Reading Waterhouse's most famous Tennyson illustration — and the Pre-Raphaelite tradition it completed.

Six paintings: sunset warship, steam locomotive, slave-ship, dawn vapour, Carthage harbour, basalt cave. They show Turner inventing how the modern eye sees weather.

Ten paintings that show how John Constable invented modern landscape from a stretch of English river, a stand of oaks, and a sky that wouldn't sit still.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau was twenty-five when he painted Canto XXX of the Inferno — Schicchi biting Capocchio, a winged demon hovering above. The 1850 canvas is the outlier of his career and a fixed image in dark academia. Reading the painting, the canto, and where it belongs on the wall.

A man in a dark green coat stands on a rocky outcrop with his back to the viewer. Below him, valleys are filled with white mist. Above him, jagged Saxon mountains break through the fog. He is alone. His face cannot be seen. The painting is 95 by 75 centimetres — small for the genre — and was painted in 1818, when Caspar David Friedrich was forty-four years old and not yet famous. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is the most reproduced painting of German Romanticism and the found

Two Witches' Sabbath paintings, twenty-five years apart. How Francisco Goya used the supernatural to attack the very institutions that fed it.