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Died on 07 May 1840: Caspar-David
Friedrich, German painter born on 05 September 1774.
— Caspar David Friedrich was an outstanding 19th-century German romantic
painter whose awesome landscapes and seascapes are not only meticulous observations
of nature but are also allegories. Friedrich was born in Greifswald and
studied at the Copenhagen Academy. In 1798 he settled in Dresden, where
he became a member of an artistic and literary circle imbued with the ideals
of the romantic movement. His early drawings—precisely outlined in pencil
or sepia—explored motifs recurrent throughout his work: rocky beaches, flat,
barren plains, infinite mountain ranges, and trees reaching toward the sky.
Later, his work began to reflect more of his emotional response to natural
scenery.
He began to paint in oils in 1807; one of
his first canvases, The
Cross in the Mountains (1807), is representative of his mature
style. A bold break from traditional religious painting, this work is almost
pure landscape; the figure of the crucified Christ, seen from behind and
silhouetted against a mountain sunset, is almost lost in the natural setting.
According to Friedrich's own writings, all the elements in the composition
have symbolic meanings. The mountains are allegories of faith; the rays
of the setting sun symbolize the end of the pre-Christian world; and the
fir trees stand for hope. Friedrich's cold, acid colors, clear lighting,
and sharp contours heighten the feeling of melancholy, isolation, and human
powerlessness against the ominous forces of nature expressed in his paintings.
As a faculty member of the Dresden Academy, Friedrich influenced later German
romantic painters. Although his reputation declined after his death, 20th-century
viewers are fascinated by his imagery.
— The German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich
was one of the greatest exponents in European art of the symbolic landscape.
He studied at the Academy in Copenhagen (1794-1798), and subsequently settled
in Dresden, often traveling to other parts of Germany. Friedrich's landscapes
are based entirely on those of northern Germany and are beautiful renderings
of trees, hills, harbors, morning mists, and other light effects based on
a close observation of nature. Some of Friedrich's best-known paintings
are expressions of a religious mysticism. In 1808 he exhibited one of his
most controversial paintings, The Cross in the Mountains , in which
— for the first time in Christian art — an altarpiece was conceived
in terms of a pure landscape. The cross, viewed obliquely from behind, is
an insignificant element in the composition. More important are the dominant
rays of the evening sun, which the artist said depicted the setting of the
old, pre~Christian world. The mountain symbolizes an immovable faith, while
the fir trees are an allegory of hope. Friedrich painted several other important
compositions in which crosses dominate a landscape. Even some of Friedrich's
apparently nonsymbolic paintings contain inner meanings, clues to which
are provided either by the artist's writings or those of his literary friends.
For example, a landscape showing a ruined abbey in the snow, Abbey with
Oak Trees (1810), can be appreciated on one level as a bleak, winter
scene, but the painter also intended the composition to represent both the
church shaken by the Reformation and the transitoriness of earthly things.
— Romanticism was an early nineteenth-century aesthetic movement encompassing
nature, nationalism, and spirituality. In Germany, it found perfect expression
in the music of Beethoven, the writings of Goethe, and the art of Caspar
David Friedrich. Today, Friedrich is recognised as the quintessential German
Romantic painter. In his lifetime, though, he achieved only modest fame,
and his talent was cheapened by imitation. His melancholy, sometimes morbid
style appealed to Romantic tastes, but fell from favour as the ardour of
Romanticism cooled. Born 5 September 1774, Friedrich is often compared to
his contemporaries, the landscape painters Turner and Constable. But his
paintings are not landscapes; Friedrich never painted from nature. He travelled
throughout northern Europe and made detailed sketches of its terrain, but
his paintings contain elements of different settings in wholly imagined
scenes. Friedrich actually ignores the law of nature for aesthetic impact.
In his paintings Friedrich rarely depicts people, except to emphasise nature's
vastness. When figures appear in his paintings, they stand with their backs
to the viewer, lost in contemplation. Friedrich is primarily a religious
artist. The Romantic worship of nature finds literal expression in his work,
which articulates the artist's Protestant faith through natural symbolism.
On a sensual level, his paintings deliver a frisson of ecstasy or horror.
But they also demand intellectual decoding. The transience of human existence,
the redemptive powers of nature, man at the mercy of the elements - all
are stock themes of Romanticism. For Friedrich, though, they had personal
meaning too. At 13, Friedrich fell through the surface of a frozen lake
and nearly perished. His brother saved Friedrich's life but drowned in the
effort. Friedrich's mother died in 1781, and a sister ten years later. His
dark, deeply religious paintings may reflect these childhood tragedies.
After studying in Copenhagen, Friedrich left his home, Greifswald, for Dresden,
the art capital of Europe in the nineteenth century. He specialised in sepia,
watercolors, and topographical drawings, turning to oils by 1808. In 1825,
Friedrich suffered a severe illness from which he never fully recovered.
A decade later, a stroke left him partially paralysed, and too weak to paint
in oils. Instead, he returned to the watercolors and sepias of his youth.
But he was a broken, bitter man. He died on 7th May 1840, impoverished and
obscure. Friedrich remained shrouded in obscurity until the 1890s, when
he was rediscovered by the Symbolists. In 1945, fire gutted the National
Gallery, Berlin, destroying many of his masterpieces. The scarcity of Friedrich's
paintings heightens their emotive power today.
— LINKS
— Landscape
with Solitary Tree (1822, 55x71cm)
— Chalk
Cliffs on Rügen (1819) — Cloister
Cemetery in the Snow — Large
Enclosure — Riesengebirge
(1835) — The Sea
of Ice — Wanderer
Above the Sea of Fog (1818, 94x75cm) — Woman
in front of the Setting Sun (1818, 22x30cm) — The
Stages of Life (1835, 72x68cm) — Schlafender
Knabe (1802, Bleistift, Pinsel in Braun, Feder in Schwarz und Braun,
18x12cm).
— Tetschen
Altarpiece or The Cross in the Mountains (1807, 115x110cm) This painting
was originally intended to be an altarpiece for the Swedish King, Gustav
IV Adolf, but it instead came into the possession of Count Franz Anton von
Thun-Hohenstein, and was hung in the bedroom of the Count's residence at
Schloss Tetschen in northern Bohemia. Friedrich wrote of this painting:
"Jesus Christ, nailed to the tree, is turned here towards the sinking sun,
the image of the eternal life-giving father. With Jesus's teaching an old
world dies - that time when God the Father moved directly on the earth.
This sun sank and the earth was not able to grasp the departing light any
longer. There shines forth in the gold of the evening light the purest,
noblest metal of the Saviour's figure on the cross, which thus reflects
on earth in a softened glow. The cross stands erected on a rock, unshakeably
firm like our faith in Jesus Christ. The firs stand around the cross, evergreen,
enduring through all ages, like the hopes of man in Him, the crucified."
— Abbey
in the Oakwood (1809; 110x171cm) This atmospheric painting depicts a
funeral procession. The monks carry a casket past an open grave, towards
a crucifix. The ground is covered with snow and littered with pagan symbols.
Friedrich used oak trees as a symbol of the old Pagan way of life. The setting
is Eldena, the ruined Cistertian abbey three miles from Friedrich's birthplace
of Greifswald.
— Winter
Landscape with Church (1811, 33x46cm) The figure in this painting is
probably Friedrich himself. The traveller has abandoned his crutch and is
praying before a crucifix before resuming his journey onwards to the Gothic
cathedral in the distance.
— The
Tree of Crows (1822) — View
from the Painter's Studio (1806) — Cemetery
at Dusk (1826, 143x110cm) — Eldena
Ruin (1825, 35x49cm) — Monastery
Graveyard in the Snow (1819, 121x170cm) — On
board a Sailing Ship — Chalk
Cliffs on Rügen (1819) — Man
and Woman Contemplating the Moon (1835, 34x44cm) — Woman
on the Beach of Rügen (1818) — The
Cross on the Mountain — City
at Moonrise (1817) — Landscape
with Oak Trees and a Hunter (1811) — Abbey
in an Oak Forest (1810) — Evening
— The
Cross in the Mountains (1808)— Moon
rising over Sea (1821) — Port
by Moonlight (1811) — Largeness
— Landscape
in the Riesengebirge
— 59
smallish images at www.geocities.com/Paris/Arc/5340/friedric.htm (they
average about 600x425 pixels, 50KB) |
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