Caspar David Friedrich, the great German Romantic painter. Life, works, style

Caspar David Friedrich (Greifswald, 1774 - Dresden, 1840) was the most significant painter of German Romanticism, celebrated for his rendering of vast, mysterious Nordic landscapes that express man’s feelings of awe and helplessness in the face of nature’s mysterious power.His works helped establish the aesthetic idea of the “sublime” as a central issue of Romanticism and revolutionized the traditional landscape painting genre. Indeed, Friedrich participated, as a man and as an artist, in the Romantic revolution, and in a break with neoclassical landscape painting, he introduced into the painted scenes the richness of his feelings, an awareness of man’s mortal frailty, and anguish in the face of the grandeur and infinitude of the elements and natural happenings.

Not an objective reproduction of scenarios with canonical themes and motifs, but rather an interpretation of them, fascinated by the symbolic and allegorical power of earthly environments seen as a religious emanation. This elevation of the landscape painting genre had a national and international impact. Mountainous and seascapes, sunlit vistas and misty expanses, with few and essential human presences mostly with their backs to the viewer, opened up largely unknown ways, such as including the audience in the process of identification and interpretation. A combination in which the monumental nature is joined by hidden symbols, messengers of religiosity and mysticism, related to loneliness, death and the hope of salvation.

As the new trend of Realism in painting gained momentum in the mid-19th century, his work was forgotten, only to be rediscovered in the early 20th century. His solitary and melancholy personality and expression determined the image of the quintessential artist in the Romantic era. The oil on canvas The Wayfarer in the Mist of 1818, kept at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, is the painting that more than any other has become iconic of European Romanticism.

The Life of Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich was born in Greifswald, a small town in Swedish Pomerania (at the time inside the German borders) overlooking the Baltic coast, on September 5, 1774 into a Lutheran family. His mother died in 1781, when Friedrich was only 7 years old, and this was the first of other family bereavements that impacted his personal life: in 1787 his brother, Johann Christoffer, died while attempting to rescue Caspar David, who fell into icy waters while skating on a frozen ditch. Little more than a teenager, Friedrich began taking drawing lessons from Johann Gottfried Quistorp, an artist and lecturer at the University of Greifswald, whose art faculty today takes the very name “Caspar David Friedrich Institut.” In 1794, Quistorp got him a position at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, known as the most progressive academy in Europe at the time. In the Danish capital, the doors of the Statens Museum for Kunst were opened to him, where he was able to study the very important collection of paintings by seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painters. Until 1796 Friedrich first took courses in freehand drawing and then in sculpture. His teachers were some of the best Danish painters of the time: the landscape painter Christian August Lorentzen, the portrait and landscape painter Jens Juel, proponents of Sturm und Drang and meeting point between Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and the history painter Nicolai Abildgaard. However, the Copenhagen Academy did not offer a course in painting, and in 1798 Friedrich moved to Dresden, enrolling in theAcademy of Art where he exhibited for the first time the following year. His early works were etchings, watercolors, and sepia drawings, with two of which in 1805 he won a prize from the Weimar Art Society, chaired by the celebrated Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Meyer, and established himself as an artist.

Dresden apart from long stays in his hometown Greifswald became a second home for the rest of his life. It was from here that his repeated excursions around the forests of Pomerania, the Riesengebirge (Giant Mountains), the Harz mountains, and the island of Rügen would start. Immersions in nature that had a great bearing on his artistic interpretation of landscape painting. Many of his paintings were modeled on sketches and studies of the scenic places he discovered during his travels. Already in his earliest paintings, The Cross in the Mountains also known as the Tetchen Altarpiece (1807-1808) and Morning Mist in the Mountains (1808), Friedrich espoused Romantic ideals by establishing his own style, characterized by a sense of stillness and isolation, and religious symbolism drawn from nature. Thus were born the first masterpieces that found an admiring public.

In 1810 he gained further fame by becoming an external member of the Berlin Academy of Art, and two works The Monk by the Sea (1808-1810) and The Abbey in an Oak Wood (1809-1810) exhibited there were purchased by the Prussian crown prince and are now in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Quickly gaining recognition as one of the leaders of the Romanticism movement in Germany, he was elected a member of the Dresden Academy in 1816. During the years of the empire and until the fall of Napoleon in 1815, Friedrich as an avowed anti-Frenchman, harbored resentment for the French occupation of Pomerania and also expressed political meanings in his works, depicting typically German sites, excerpts from culture and mythology that symbolically communicated a sense of pride in belonging to the country and a desire for independence from foreign domination. From 1817-1818 the motif of human figures mostly seen from behind began to play an increasing role in his paintings. An admirable example is the famous The Wayfarer in the Mist, which has become among the most representative of his cultural era.

In 1818, at the age of forty-four, he married the young Caroline Bommer by whom he would have three children and began to depict her, accompanying his well-established motif of the solitary figure immersed in the landscape with another figure to form a couple. Friedrich also continued to subtly express his liberal convictions, for example by depicting men dressed in the traditional German patriotic costumes banned at the time (as precisely in The Wayfarer in the Mist or Two Men Contemplating the Moon of 1819 or The Grave of Hutten, a political confession he painted years later (1823-1824). Some of his works were later adopted and abused by the Nazi regime as testaments to intense German nationalism. Substantially reinterpreted to fit new political intentions.

Friedrich between the 1920s and 1930s had gained theattention and support of important international figures, such as Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, his buyer who financed his work, and Alexander II who commissioned works from him until 1830. In the years to come, interest in his work declined, partly because of liberal political positions, and he experienced some setbacks due to the growing critical interest in realism and naturalism in German art. Friedrich’s allegiance to Romantic landscapes “went out of fashion.” As early as 1924 he was denied a professorship in landscape painting at the Dresden Academy. Along with notoriety, his patrons also diminished. In addition, his health began to deteriorate, culminating in a stroke in 1835 that left him partially paralyzed and facing increasing financial difficulties. Nevertheless, these last years of his life were productive, seeing the creation of important works such as The Stages of Life (1834-1835). Unable to work with oil paint, he limited his artistic output to sepia-toned drawings, eventually giving them up altogether. Before his death in May 1840, he suffered a second stroke. He was buried in Dresden’s Trinity Cemetery.

Friedrich’s style and masterpieces

Caspar David Friedrich is considered the most important representative of the symbolic landscape within German and European Romanticism. He created an alternative to traditional painting by introducing a novelty, a new language of evocation rather than imitation laden with symbolism and feeling, focusing mainly on the rendering of ambient light. In his early works, having arrived at the Dresden Academy, he produced manyetchings using theetching andinlay technique. Until 1804 the artist produced 18 etchings and has 4 inlays and began to devote himself towatercolor, which became his favorite technique before producing his large works on canvas. The only oil exception from that period was Landscape with ruined temple of 1797.

To his watercolors and sepia-toned drawings, executed in a clean primitive style that earned him the Weimar Art Society’s award in 1805, he would also return in the last years of his life. His first major oil painting came at the age of 34 in 1808. The Cross in the Mountains aroused controversy and at the same time widespread consideration, as for the first time in art it was a landscape that was the subject of a religious altarpiece. The work, also known in fact as the Tetchen Altarpiece, established his mature style, characterized by an evocative sense of stillness and isolation, an attempt to replace the traditional symbolism of religious painting with one drawn from nature. Friedrich went beyond the imitation of classical nature and conceived a space of contemplation for himself and the viewer, with recurring themes and symbols. He made some studies en plein-air but did not paint in the open air, using his notes to then make the composition in the studio drawing also from memory and imagination. Indeed, he asserted that the painter should paint what he sees within himself and not only what is in front of him.

Most of his masterpieces feature formal symmetries and contrasts of horizontal and vertical elements and a perfect coloristic rendering of light effects in natural environments. Forests, hills, harbors, shrouded in fog or amid plays of clouds in the sky, sunrises and sunsets, however moments of the day when weather phenomena and the relationship between sunlight and darkness emphasized the greatest emotional intensity. By using dramatic perspectives, Friedrich encouraged the viewer to accept the power of nature as divine proof, providing an opportunity to contemplate God’s presence in the landscape.

The muted color palette and emphasis on light created an oppressive sense of emptiness that would influence modern art. The visual minimalism of his paintings was unusual, stylized landscapes in which he provided more than details primarily sensory information of which the depiction of fog was an important vehicle(Morning Mist in the Mountains, 1808). As the artist explained, “when a landscape is covered with fog, it appears larger, more sublime, and increases the power of the imagination and excites anticipation, somewhat like a veiled woman. The eye and imagination feel more attracted to the misty distance than to what is near and far before us.”

In the works that later became more important, it is the construction of the scene that determines the emotion. Planes seem to blur together, between foreground and distant references, as is exemplarily seen in the work Munich by the Sea (1808-1810). Friedrich painted a vast empty landscape dominated in the upper three-quarters of the canvas by a blue-gray sky and the green sea. In the foreground is an irregular strip of beige earth where, to the left, stands a man. Although he has his back to the viewer, he is identifiable as a monk in a long dark robe. The canvas is filled with large expanses of color, punctuated by small strokes of white to denote some crests of waves and birds in the sky. It is a masterpiece of minimalism and painterly restraint.

The painter had introduced a specific and recognizable compositional motif called "Rückenfigur." This is a solitary human figure seen from behind caught contemplating the view, a device that allows the viewer of the work to identify with the character observing the landscape. One of the key ways in which German Romanticism differs from French and British Romanticism. Also from the same years 1808-1810 are works such as The Abbey in the Oak Grove in which the artist included traces of Gothic architecture, here in the form of abbey ruins. This reflects a nationalist pride in the monuments of Germany’s Gothic past that were especially significant during the years of Napoleonic occupation.

Friedrich’s subjects were deeply influenced by Germany’s Baltic coast and the mountainous profile of central Germany. And although he relied on careful observation of the landscape from life, his works were colored by his imaginative response to the atmosphere of the Harz mountains, the cliffs of Rügen, the surroundings of Dresden, and the Elbe River. According to some art historians, the marriage produced changes in his painting. In fact, the paintings of this period are lighter with brighter colors and less drama, and they compose figures of women and couples. The White Cliffs of Rügen (1818), painted after his honeymoon, or On the Sailing Boat (1819) are good examples of this development. Modernist painters would learn from his use of color and the simplicity of his compositions that conveyed his fatalism with respect to tumultuous and unpredictable nature.

From The Sea of Ice, also known as The Shipwreck of Hope, of 1823-1824, in which a wreckage of a ship crashed against the ice and rocks of the shore appears, emerges Friedrich’s expressed sense of man’s helplessness in relation to powerful and unforgiving nature. In this inhospitable realm of frozen seas, it is necessary for man to resort to his spiritual strength.

Friedrich’s Legacy

Friedrich’s suggestive use of symbols to imply deeper meanings was an important example for 19th-century Symbolists and 20th-century Surrealists, who embraced his creation of poetic moods. In addition, his minimalism and broad fields of color were fundamental to abstract expressionism. In more recent years, the rehabilitation of Friedrich’s work provides an example of a strong Germanic heritage while also showing quiet evocations of absence and loss, important themes in post-World War II European painting, influencing new generations of modern German artists such as Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter.

Where to see Friedrich’s major works

Friedrich was a very prolific artist and produced more than five hundred works. Today his paintings are exhibited in many important museums around the world, The National Gallery in London, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, or the Oskar Reinhart Museum in Winterthur, Switzerland, but in particular the great masterpieces are concentrated in Germany. In Berlin between Schloss Charlottenburg and the Alte Nationalgalerie, at the Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden as at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, where among others one can find the famous The Wayfarer in the Fog and The Sea of Ice.

But also at the Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum in Hanover, which boasts an evocative cycle of works devoted to the four phases of the day and of which the canvas Morning (1821) is particularly famous. As well as at the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, and in Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, Cologne, all the way to Leipzig, where one of the artist’s greatest and last masterpieces The Ages of Life (1835) stands out at the Museum der Bildenden Künste.

Caspar David Friedrich, the great German Romantic painter. Life, works, style

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