Short answers, pulled from the story.
Caspar David Friedrich (the 5th of September 1774 - the 7th of May 1840) was a German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He transformed landscape painting from a backdrop for human drama into a standalone subject charged with spiritual and emotional meaning, and his influence extended to Expressionism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism.
Friedrich was born in Greifswald, Swedish Pomerania, on the Baltic coast of Germany. He studied at the Academy of Copenhagen from 1794 to 1798, then settled permanently in Dresden in 1798, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life.
The Ruckenfigur is a compositional device Friedrich used repeatedly: a human figure seen from behind, placed before a vast landscape so that the viewer shares the same vantage point and perspective. The device was designed to encourage the viewer to identify with the figure and share a sublime appreciation of nature.
Friedrich died in obscurity in 1840 with his reputation long in decline. A revival began in 1906 with a Berlin exhibition of thirty-two of his works, but his association with Nazi nationalism in the 1930s caused another sharp decline. It was not until the 1970s that he regained major international standing and came to be regarded as a national cultural icon in Germany.
Standing before Friedrich's painting Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, Samuel Beckett (1906-89) said this was the source of Waiting for Godot. The remark is one of the most direct acknowledgments of Friedrich's influence on 20th-century creative work outside the visual arts.
Friedrich used bare oak trees and stumps to symbolise death, crosses and clearing skies to represent redemption, and anchors on shorelines to indicate spiritual hope. The slender moon suggested hope and the growing closeness of Christ. These symbols appeared consistently across more than 500 attributed works.