Lake in the Mountains

For the most part Piepenhagen painted his poetic visions of mountain valleys with waterfalls and rivers, castle ruins on rocks, water surfaces of Alpine lakes with sailing boats, forest paths shrouded in mist or illuminated by either moonlight or the sun. In creating them, he followed the exemple of the German landscape painter Karl Blechen: his means was diffuse light and soft brush strokes. Piepenhagen's dreamlike landscapes only seldom have staffage - their salient feature is a distant horizon. This corresponds to the extraordinary sense of distance in time and space, one of the traits of Romanticism from the very beginning.