We can see all this in the Wanderer: tranquillity, nationalism, self-assurance and artistic maturity. We can also see the early signs of an artist who has decided to put aside experimentation and seek comfort in tradition. The absence of perspective in earlier paintings had once caused scandal. In the Wanderer, perspective was solidly re-established: foreground and background are clearly distinguishable. There is no longer an ‘apocalypse’ happening, in Kleistian terms. The human figure, which was once so small and marginal, and almost invisible in the Monk, reclaimed its place at the centre of the picture. The Romantic tropes of distant horizons, lone figures, sublime nature and fog are all used in a way that maximises their impact: they are now legible, written in a language that the viewer can understand and relate to. This overemphasis is part of the reason why the critic Jensen would later describe the painting as ‘an artistic failure’. The exaggerated human ‘wanderer’ creates a figure who is not sinking into the environment but set outside it.

Early Romanticism was an extreme philosophy. It was predicated on an almost fanatical adherence to one’s own values, a loyalty to one’s own private world, which often proved fatal to its proponents. Many of the early Romantics died young or displayed an inclination for self-destruction that had been unseen in similar cultural movements in Europe. And those who didn’t die tended to live difficult lives. Even love, the early Romantics thought, must be painful to be real.

To Romanticise the world, distant horizons must remain forever distant, desires forever unsatisfied. Death at a young age wasn’t just an accident or the consequence of lives lived fast and hard, but an essential part of the Romantic project: John Keats and J W Polidori died at 25, Novalis at 28, Percy Bysshe Shelley at 29, Kleist at 34, Lord Byron at 36. What could be a better way of never meeting the distant horizons of your hopes than dying before you reached them? It’s not chance, then, that those who didn’t die young strayed into madness, poverty, bigotry or irrelevance. Early Romanticism was a passionate philosophy of youth: it had no place for the tranquillity of middle age.

The answer lies with the unique Romantic understanding of experience. ‘Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can,’ writes Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens (2011). ‘We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; we must learn to appreciate different styles of music.’ Today, we take it for granted that experience is the essential matter of a richly lived life, but in the 18th century, before the Jena Circle emerged, this was a radical and potentially dangerous claim.