A Rückenfigur, German for back figure, is a person painted from behind who stands inside the picture and looks at the view, so that the viewer takes that person's place. The reference work is Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, painted by Caspar David Friedrich around 1818, in which a man on a rock faces a valley of fog with his back to the viewer.
Painters had turned figures away from the viewer for centuries, usually as one detail among many. Friedrich made the turned back the center of the picture, and the habit outlived him, passing through Danish interiors, a Surrealist portrait and an American bay window.
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In 1822 Friedrich painted his wife Caroline leaning out of a window in his Dresden studio, her back to the room and to anyone looking at the canvas. A Viennese reviewer wrote that the picture would have been very true and pretty if Friedrich had not again painted a person from behind. That word again says the habit was already familiar, and already tiresome to some.
Twelve years before, the same habit had drawn the opposite reaction. In 1810 the Berlin Academy showed Friedrich's picture of a lone monk on a dune, and the poet Clemens Brentano wrote that, standing before it, he had become the monk and the painting the dune. The Vienna reviewer wanted a face and found a back. Brentano took the monk's place and never missed the face.
Between those two reactions sits much of the history of the device.
Did anyone paint a turned back before Friedrich?
Yes, and some of the examples are famous…
What You'll Discover
What happened to that poet's review.
What Caroline sees from the window.
Whose back Hammershøi kept painting.
What Magritte and Hopper left out.