Joseph Leo Koerner is Victor S. Thomas Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. His books include The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (1993), Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (Reaktion, 1st edn 1993, 2nd edn 2009) and Reformation of the Image (Reaktion, 2004).

Provides insights not only into the nature of Friedrich’s art, but also into the whole predicament of art in the early nineteenth century . . . It is a book that should be read by all who have an interest in the art of the period. - Burlington MagazineThis is a model of interpretative art history, taking in a good deal of German Romantic philosophy, but founded always on the immediate experience of the picture . . . It is rare to find a scholar so obviously in sympathy with his subject. - The IndependentThis masterly book on what must be one of the most clear and deliberate - and thus most intelligible - bodies of work to have been produced ... is impressively contextual, as well as being minutely forensic . . . Koerner uses the pictures to think about subjectivity and the self in a very twentieth-century way. - TLSOne of the best books about the work of a single artist that I have read for a long, long time. It seems to me to have everything. - Frank Whitford, Kaleidoscope, BBC Radio 4There’s a haunting coda to Koerner’s scholarly analysis of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, and his place in art history . . . This has many reproductions more true to Friedrich’s winter colouring than I’ve seen before. - The Guardian