Caspar David Friedrich
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Caspar David Friedrich (September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840) was a 19th century German romantic painter, considered by many critics to be one of the finest representatives of the movement.
Life
Born in Greifswald, a small town in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (at the time Swedish territory, now Germany) Friedrich was the son of a candle-maker, from whom he received a religious education which would influence his work. Another possible influence on Friedrich's work was the witnessing of the premature death of one of his brothers while ice skating in the frozen Baltic Sea. The brother was attempting to save Caspar from falling through the ice when he fell through himself. As well, his mother died when he was seven and two of his sisters died before he was 18. These difficulties experienced in childhood could be possible reasons for the tragic and sometimes lugubrious visions portrayed in his art.After previous lessons of drawing and etching with a local master, Quistorp, Friedrich studied at Copenhagen from 1794 to 1798 under Nikolaj Abraham Abildgaard and Jens Juel. After leaving Copenhagen, he visited several scenic spots in Germany before settling in Dresden. There he was in touch with the best cultural and artistical personalities of the time in Germany like Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, Schelling, Phillip Otto Runge and Carl Gustav Carus. Fellow artists and friends described him as a mysterious and mystic character, with an almost monkish lifestyle. His studio was bare and kept only the essential tools for work. He needed solitude and introspection to achieve his visions as he wrote: "Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with your spiritual eye then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react on others from the outside inwards."
After a long period of bachelorhood devoted to his art, he married young Caroline Bommer in 1818. They had three children (one of them, Emma, died in childhood). This led him to value having human figures in his compositions. In 1817 he became a member of the Academy of Dresden and around 1820 Nicholas I, future Czar of Russia, visited his studio and became one of his patrons which led to the purchase of many paintings. Frederick William III, king of Prussia, was also an enthusiast of his art. Although his reserved and introspective personality was an obstacle to success, by this time he was a recognized and successful painter. The years immediately prior to his death were made painful by declining health (in 1835 he suffered a stroke) which prevented him from painting in oil. Caspar David Friedrich died in Dresden.
Work
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After the development of sepia drawings and watercolours (mainly naturalistic and topographical), Friedrich took up oil painting after the age of thirty. His paintings were modeled on his sketches and studies of scenic spots, like the cliffs on Rügen, the surroundings of Dresden or Elbe and later composed in symbolic, often symmetrically balanced, compositions. His first mature style painting is the "Tetschen Altar" (1807) in which the crucified Christ is seen in profile in the top of a mountain, alone, surrounded by nature. In his time this work was not unanimously accepted for the principal role of landscape in a religious subject, however, this was his first appraised painting.
His famous morbidly romantic painting "Mönch am Meer" (Monk by the Sea) impressed Karl Friedrich Schinkel (later Prussia's most famous classicist architect) so much that he gave up painting and took up architecture, much to the benefit of German and world architecture.
Friedrich´s masterpieces were almost forgotten by the general public in the second half of 19th century and only at the end of 19th and beginning of 20th century he was rediscovered by Symbolist painters for his visionary and allegorical landscapes. For that same reason Max Ernst and other surrealists saw him as a precursor of their movement.
Adolf Hitler would later cite Friedrich's work as expressing the Aryan ideals and co-opted a painting as a cover for Nazi propaganda, making some contemporary critics and art historians reluctant to promote Friedrich's work.
As well as other romantic painters like Turner or Constable he made landscape painting a major genre in western art. Friedrich's style influenced the painting of the Norwegian Johann Christian Dahl but the successors of his painting style did not achieve his mastery and depth. Arnold Böcklin was strongly influenced by his work and perhaps also the painters of the American Hudson River School, the Rocky Mountain School, and the New England Luminists.
Friedrich also sketched monuments (a memorial) and sculptures for mausoleums, which reflects his obssession with death and afterlife, and some funereal art in Dresden´s cemeteries are his. Some of his masterpieces were destroyed due to a fire in Munich's Glass Palace (1931) and in Bombing of Dresden in World War II.
Quotes
"The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself. If he sees nothing within, then he should stop painting what is in front of him.", Caspar David Friedrich"A mountain of ice and the debris of a ship that has been crushed by it. It is a great tragedy, not a single survivor.", David d´Angers, 19th century French sculptor about "The sea of ice".
Selected works
- ca. 1807 - [Tetschen altar], oil on canvas
- ca. 1810 - [Cross on the mountain], oil on canvas -Kunstmuseum at Dusseldorf, Germany
- 1810 - [Cloister Graveyard in the Snow], oil on canvas
- 1811 - [Winter landscape], oil on canvas -National Gallery, London, UK
- (date unknown) - [View of Arkona at Moonrise], sepia drawing
- 1817 - [Wanderer above the sea of fog], oil on canvas -Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany
- 1822 - [The tree of crows], oil on canvas -Louvre Museum, France
- ca.1830 - [Trees in the moonlight], oil on canvas
External links
- [Hamburg Kunsthalle Collection]
- [Caspar David Friedrich Foundation]
- [Hermitage Museum Archive]
- [a painting selection of Caspar David Friedrich]
- [Web Gallery of Art] - comprehensive collection of Friedrich's works
- [Artcyclopedia] - links to Friedrich's pictures from Image Archives, articles etc
| Romanticism | |
|---|---|
| 18th century - 19th century | |
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| Visual art and architecture: Brullov - Constable - Corot - Delacroix - Friedrich - Géricault - Gothic Revival architecture - Goya - Hudson River school - Leutze - Nazarene movement - Palmer - Turner | |
| Romantic culture: Bohemianism - Romantic nationalism | |
| << Age of Enlightenment | Victorianism >> Realism >> |
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