The German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich studied for a time at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He then settled in Dresden. Among his most famous works is Wanderer above the Sea of Fog from 1818. Willumsen’s female mountaineer bears certain similarities to this work. In both pictures, nature is sublime, and the human figure stands alone and reverent before its forces.

Friedrich was celebrated by the Nazis as part of German National Romanticism. Only long after the Second World War was he rehabilitated.

There are only a handful of works by Friedrich in Denmark. The drawing in the exhibition first belonged to King Christian VIII and has since been passed down from monarch to monarch. Although I am a republican, I appreciate King Frederik lending us the drawing.