Caspar David Friedrich
The landscape painter of Romanticism.
Caspar David Friedrich painted desolate landscapes, ruins and people seen from behind. In his work nature becomes a spiritual space.
Caspar David Friedrich was born in 1774 in Greifswald, which then belonged to Sweden as part of Swedish Pomerania. His father made candles and soap. His childhood was marked by grief. His mother died when he was seven, and a few years later a brother drowned while they were skating, according to family tradition while trying to save Caspar. Friedrich studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen from 1794 to 1798 and then settled in Dresden, where he lived for the rest of his life.
He began with drawings and sepia washes and gradually moved to oil. His breakthrough, and a scandal, came with The Cross in the Mountains (1808), an altarpiece showing nothing but a crucifix on a mountain top at sunset. Critics argued that a landscape had no place on an altar. The painting is in Dresden. In 1810 the Prussian crown prince bought The Monk by the Sea and The Abbey in the Oakwood, which are now in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
Among his best-known works are Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818) in the Hamburger Kunsthalle and Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (c. 1818) in Winterthur, Switzerland. The Sea of Ice (1823–24) in Hamburg shows a ship crushed by ice floes. Friedrich often painted people seen from behind, so-called Rückenfiguren. The viewer sees nature through their eyes. His compositions are austere, often symmetrical, and filled with silence: mist, moonlight, ruins, bare trees and endless horizons.
For Friedrich nature was a spiritual space where man meets God and his own smallness. He did not paint directly from nature but composed his pictures in the studio from careful sketches. He was reserved and melancholy. In 1818 he married Caroline Bommer, and they had three children. His popularity declined after the 1820s. In 1835 he suffered a stroke, and he died in poverty in 1840.
Friedrich was almost entirely forgotten but was rediscovered around 1900. Today he is regarded as the foremost painter of German Romanticism. His pictures have been compared with later abstract painting, and the 250th anniversary of his birth in 2024 was marked with major exhibitions in Germany.