After his marriage to Caroline Brommer, Caspar David Friedrich began to include women in his work as can be seen in Woman before the Setting Sun from 1818-20.
This picture is the essence of Romantic engagement with awe-inspiring nature, as the woman’s outstretched arms seem to communicate an intensely personal encounter with the sublimity of the fading light. We can only guess at her expression as she is facing away from us, a device perhaps to put us in her position of wonder.
Caspar David Friedrich’s Woman Before the Setting Sun is in the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany.