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(b Greifswald, 5 Sept 1774; d Dresden, 7 May 1840). German painter, draughtsman and printmaker. Along with Phillip Otto Runge, he was the leading artist of the German Romantic movement, notable especially for his symbolic and atmospheric treatment of landscape.
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Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), one of the major artists of German romanticism, revived landscape painting in Germany, depicting through nature his own melancholy moods, pantheistic beliefs, and nationalistic feelings.
Born on Sept. 5, 1774, in Greifswald, Caspar David Friedrich was the son of a soap manufacturer. His mother died when he was 7; and when he was 13, his favorite brother died while the two boys were ice-skating, for which Caspar David suffered a lifelong sense of guilt. The painter's familiarity with death and his melancholy disposition were further affirmed by a suicide attempt.
Friedrich began studying drawing in 1788; in 1794 he entered the art academy in Copenhagen, one of the most liberal in Europe, notably in its unusual emphasis on drawing from nature rather than from older art. His teachers were masters of Danish neoclassicism, but they also transmitted the concepts of early English romanticism, notably Henry Fuseli's theories, before Friedrich left for Dresden in 1798.
Friedrich's early landscapes and engravings are much like his teachers' works, but constant sketching after nature released him from neoclassic formulations, and a careful realistic rendering asserted itself in vast, spacious landscapes at times populated by small isolated figures or heroic ruins. By 1806 he had developed an independent formal and iconological vocabulary.
Friedrich's reputation grew rapidly; he found patrons among Saxony's nobility and received the Prize of the Weimar Friends of Art. He became acquainted with the major writers of German romanticism and with the painters Phillip Otto Runge, Johan Christian Dahl, and Carl Gustav Carus. In 1808 the classicist critic F. W. B. von Ramdohr attacked Friedrich's painting Cross in the Mountains (also known as the Tetschen Altarpiece), demanding whether "it is a good idea to use landscape allegorically to represent a religious concept or even to arouse a sense of reverence." After criticizing the painting, depicting a crucifix on a mountain illuminated by the setting sun, Ramdohr concluded that a depiction of nature cannot properly be symbolical or allegorical, that "it is the greatest arrogance when landscape painting seeks to worm its way into the churches and crawl onto the altars." Several of Friedrich's friends answered these criticisms in detail, thereby causing a major argument that served ultimately to increase the artist's fame.
Friedrich himself interpreted the painting as representing man's continuous faith and hope in the person of Jesus Christ despite the decline of formalized religion. Whether populated by Christian symbols or not, Friedrich's landscapes all possess a spiritual quality, and such religious meanings reflect his own mystical convictions. Contact with the romantic writers had convinced him that "art must have its source in man's inner being; yet, it must be dependent on a moral or religious value." Among his aphorisms on art, he wrote: "The noble man (artist) recognizes God in everything…. Shut your corporeal eye so that you first see your picture with your spiritual eye. Then bring to light that which you saw in darkness so that it may reflect on others from the exterior to their spiritual interior." Like the romantic writers, he saw art as the mediator between man and the mystical sources of nature. His own time Friedrich viewed as being on the periphery of all religions, founded on the ruins of the temples of the past and building for a future of clarity and nondogmatic religious truth.
Contemporary political events formed the other major content of Friedrich's work. The Napoleonic Wars aroused in him a fierce hatred of France and an intense love of Germany. He expressed his patriotic support of the German liberation movements in mountain scenes depicting lost French soldiers or monuments to German freedom fighters. And his disappointment in the antidemocratic Prussian restoration after the wars was symbolized in a painting of an ice-encrusted ship named Hope (1822).
In 1816 Friedrich became a member of the Dresden Academy, which gave him a steady income and allowed him to marry in 1818. In 1820 the Russian czarevitch purchased several paintings from him, but Friedrich's popularity began to decline because of his political attitudes and increasing official attacks on his art. His mental and physical health steadily deteriorated. In 1837 a serious stroke terminated his career. He died on May 7, 1840, forgotten by all but a small circle of friends. His subjective, emotional art was rediscovered early in the 20th century, when German expressionism sought similar effects through more radical means.
Further Reading
A surprisingly balanced pamphlet on Friedrich was published by the German Library of Information, Caspar David Friedrich: His Life and Work (1940). More recent is Leopold D. Ettlinger, Caspar David Friedrich (1967). See also Marcel Brion, Art of the Romantic Era (trans. 1966).
Additional Sources
Bèorsch-Supan, Helmut, Caspar David Friedrich, London: Thames & Hudson, 1974.
The romantic vision of Caspar David Friedrich: paintings and drawings from the U.S.S.R., New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago; New York: Distributed by Abrams, 1990.
Jensen, Jens Christian, Caspar David Friedrich: life and work, Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron's, 1981.
For more information on Caspar David Friedrich, visit Britannica.com.
Friedrich, Caspar David (Greifswald, 1774-1840, Dresden), German painter, studied art at Copenhagen, and in 1798 settled in Dresden. Friedrich painted chiefly landscapes and seascapes, with and without figures, architectural pictures, including a few of Dresden, and some religious subjects. Religious feeling and symbolism permeate his œuvre, of which the seascape with figures, Die Lebensstufen, is a characteristic example. He possessed considerable power to convey mood in landscape. Almost forgotten in the 19th c. and early 20th c., interest in his work increased considerably in the mid-20th c. He is hardly represented in Britain, but an exhibition of 112 of his pictures at the Tate Gallery in 1972 attracted much attention. F. G. Kersting was a friend of Friedrich.
Bibliography
See studies by H. Börsch-Supan (1974) and S. Rewald (2001).
Caspar David Friedrich (September 5, 1774 –
May 7, 1840) was a 19th century German
Caspar David Friedrich was born in Greifswald, Hither Pomerania. Relevant as a background to his work are the strict Lutheran creed of his father and his early familiarity with death: his mother died when he was seven, his sister succumbed to typhus fever and his brother drowned in a frozen lake, allegedly while trying to save Friedrich, under whose feet the ice had cracked. In 1790 he began studying art with Johann Gottfried Quistorp at the University of Greifswald and literature and aesthetics from Swedish professor Thomas Thorbild.
In 1794 he entered the prestigious Academy of Copenhagen, and in 1798 he settled in Dresden. He often painted with India ink, watercolor and sepia ink. It is unclear when he finally took up oil painting, but it was surely after the age of 30. Landscapes were his preferred subject. Mostly based on the landscapes of northern Germany, his paintings depict woods, hills, harbors, morning mists and other light effects based on a close observation of nature.
In 1808, a time when Friedrich was growing in popularity, he exhibited one of his most controversial paintings, The Cross in the Mountains (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden). For the first time in Christian art, a pure landscape was the panel of an altarpiece. The cross risest highest in the composition, but is viewed obliquely and at a distance. Friedrich said that the rays of the evening sun depicted the setting of the old, pre-Christian world. The mountain symbolizes an immovable faith, while the fir trees represent hope. Friedrich painted several other landscapes that incorporate crosses.
He was acquainted with Philipp Otto Runge, another notable German painter of the Romantic period, and gained the admiration of the poet Goethe. He was also a friend of Norwegian painter Johann Christian Dahl and Georg Friedrich Kersting. In 1810 he became a member of the Academy of Berlin. In addition to Christianity, references to German folklore became increasingly prominent, underscoring Friedrich's patriotism during the French occupation of Pomerania. Following his marriage to Caroline Bommer in 1818, he began to portray feminine characters in his paintings. Cretacic Rocks in Rügen, painted during his honeymoon, is a good example of this development.
With dawns and dusks constituting important parts of his landscapes, Friedrich's own dusk years were characterized by a growing pessimism. This is reflected in his work, which becomes darker, showing a fearsome monumentalism. The Sea of Ice perhaps summarizes Friedrich's ideas and aims at this point, though in such a radical way that the painting was not well received. Between 1830 and 1835 he became more reclusive, and he dismissed the opinions of critics and the public by only painting for his family and friends—yet his art from this period can be considered among his finest. In 1835, a stroke caused him limb paralysis and he was never able to paint again.
Following his earlier sepia drawings and watercolors (mainly naturalistic and topographical), Friedrich took up oil painting sometime 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. Later compositions were more symbolic and symmetrically balanced. The Tetschen Altar is perhaps his first stylistically mature painting. It depicts the crucified Christ in profile at the top of a mountain, alone, surrounded by nature. At his time this work was not unanimously accepted; however, this was his first appraised painting.
His well-known, especially Romantic painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog impressed Karl Friedrich Schinkel (later Prussia's most famous classicist architect) so much that he gave up painting and took up architecture.
Friedrich was almost forgotten by the general public in the second half of 19th century, and it was only at turn of the century that he was rediscovered by the Symbolist painters, who valued his visionary and allegorical landscapes. It was this aspect of his work that caused Max Ernst and other Surrealists to see him as a precursor to their movement.
Friedrich also sketched memorial monuments and sculptures for mausoleums, reflecting his obsession with death and the afterlife. Some of the funereal art in Dresden's cemeteries is his. Some of his masterpieces were lost in the fire that destroyed Munich's Glass Palace (1931) and in the bombing of Dresden in World War II.
The key to understanding Friedrich's ideas and work is the link between landscape and religion. The majority of his best-known paintings are expressions of a religious mysticism. His landscapes seek not just the blissful enjoyment of a beautiful view, as in the Classic conception, but an instant of sublimity, a reunion with the spiritual self through the lonely contemplation of an overwhelming Nature. Friedrich said, "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." Colossal skies, storms, mist, ruins, scattered tracks of life (ancient altars, wrecked ships) and crosses bearing witness to the presence of God are frequent elements in Friedrich's landscapes.
Even some of his apparently non-symbolic paintings contain inner meanings, either religious or political, clues to which are provided either by Friedrich's writings or those of his literary friends. For example, a landscape showing a ruined abbey in the snow, Abbey under Oak Trees (1810; Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin), can be appreciated on one level as a bleak, winter scene, but was also intended to represent both the church shaken by the Reformation and the transience of earthly things.
Alongside other romantic painters, such as J. M. W. Turner or John Constable, Friedrich made landscape painting a major genre in Western art. Friedrich's style influenced the painting of the aforementioned Dahl, but whether the successors to his painting style achieved his mastery and depth is debated. Arnold Böcklin was strongly influenced by his work, and perhaps as well the painters of the American Hudson River School, the Rocky Mountain School, the New England Luminists and American painters like Albert Pinkham Ryder and Ralph Blakelock.
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| NAME | Friedrich, Caspar David |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Friedrich, Caspar David |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Painting |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 5, 1774 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Greifswald, Hither Pomerania |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 7, 1840 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Dresden |
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