Ce catalogue a été édité à l'occasion de l'exposition The Romantic Vision of Caspar David Friedrich présentée à l'Art Institute of Chicago, du 1er novembre 1990 au 6 janvier 1991 et au Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, du 23 janvier au 31 mars 1991. 

"Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), Germany's greatest Romantic painter, is acclaimed for his hauntingly evocative landscapes—the Baltic shore at twilight, the mountains of the Riesengebirge at dawn, the harbor of his native Stralsund at midnight. The combined loan of nine paintings, ten watercolors, and one drawing by Friedrich from the State Hermitage Museum, Leningrad, and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, to The Art Institute of Chicago and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the first exhibition of Friedrich's work in the United States and a landmark event. Friedrich's paintings and drawings in the Soviet Union, acquired during the artist's lifetime for the Russian imperial family, form the only major collection of the painter's work outside Germany. The first Russian purchase took place in 1820, when the future Czar Nicholas I visited Friedrich's studio in Dresden."