Page 52 - Joseph Wright of Derby: Virgils's Tomb & The Grand Tour.

Fig. 14. CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH, Two Men Contemplating the Moon, 1819-1820. Galerie Neue
Meister, Dresden.

mountain or cave, is a source of awe equal to the poet’s cially his haunting study of Two Men Contemplating the
power. Perhaps the most iconic example of the soli- Moon, of 1819-20, where the moon offers a glimmer
tary dreamer in such a landscape is Caspar David of promise behind the withered tree (Fig. 14).33
Friedrich’s Wanderer above a Sea of Fog, of 1819, where
the yearning for transcendence places the dreamer In a quite different vein, Blake’s woodcuts of 1820
above the mountains and clouds, rather than below for a school edition of Virgil’s Eclogues showed how
the earth (Fig. 13). For Friedrich, as forWright, the Virgil’s ‘tenderness’, asWordsworth put it, could be
moon was both a source of mystery and an emblem conveyed afresh in art. But perhaps the artist who
of hope, used to great effect in many paintings, espe- shared Wright’s respect for the ancients, combining
it with love of the tumbling beauty of the landscape
33. Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above a Sea of Fog, 1819, and of the double light of lamp and moon, is Samuel
Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Two Men Contemplating the Moon, Palmer, an artist rarely considered as Wright’s heir.
1819-20, Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden. Palmer was steeped in Virgil, and in his early twen-
ties, responding to Blake’s woodcuts, he produced

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