The Sea of Ice

Caspar David Friedrich was a German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation, whose often symbolic, and anti-classical work, conveys a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings often set contemplative human figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. Art historian Christopher John Murray described their presence, in diminished perspective, amid expansive landscapes, as reducing the figures to a scale that directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension".

The Sea of Ice is an 1823–1824 oil-on-canvas painting by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. It depicts Friedrich's interpretation of an Arctic landscape, with a shipwreck half-buried in the ice. Its radical composition and subject matter were unusual for their time and the work was met with incomprehension. It has been retrospectively considered one of Friedrich's masterpieces.