Caspar David Friedrich was a German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation, whose often symbolic, and anti-classical work, conveys a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings often set contemplative human figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. Art historian Christopher John Murray described their presence, in diminished perspective, amid expansive landscapes, as reducing the figures to a scale that directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension".
Paintings by Caspar David Friedrich
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818)
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is a painting by German Romanticist artist Caspar David Friedrich in 1818. It depicts a man standing upon a rocky precipice with his back to the viewer; he is gazing out on a landscape covered in a thick sea of fog through which other ridges, trees, and mountains pierce, which stretches out into the distance indefinitely.
It is considered to be one of the masterpieces of the Romantic movement and one of its most representative works. The painting has been interpreted as an emblem of self-reflection or contemplation of life's path, and the landscape is considered to evoke the sublime. Friedrich was a common user of Rückenfigur (German: Rear-facing figure) in his paintings; Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is perhaps the most famous Rückenfigur in art due to the subject's prominence. The painting has also been interpreted as an expression of Friedrich's German liberal and nationalist feeling.
Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (1818)
Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (German: Kreidefelsen auf Rügen) is an oil painting of circa 1818 by German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich.
In January 1818, Caspar David Friedrich married Christiane Caroline Bommer, who was about 20 years his junior. On their honeymoon in July and August 1818, they visited relatives in Neubrandenburg and Greifswald. From there, the couple undertook an excursion to the island of Rügen with Friedrich's brother Christian. The painting appears as a celebration of the couple's union.
The Sea of Ice (1823)
The Sea of Ice (German: Das Eismeer) is an 1823–1824 oil-on-canvas painting by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. It depicts Friedrich's interpretation of an Arctic landscape, with a shipwreck half-buried in the ice. Its radical composition and subject matter were unusual for their time and the work was met with incomprehension. It has been retrospectively considered one of Friedrich's masterpieces.
The Sea of Ice was commissioned by Johann Gottlob von Quandt, who sought two paintings of southern and northern nature. Friedrich's influences are unconfirmed, but he likely drew upon William Edward Parry's 1820–1821 exhibition for the Northwest Passage; he also studied ice floes on the Elbe. Commentators have also linked it to Théodore Géricault's 'The Raft of the Medusa', and speculate it was influenced by the childhood death of Friedrich's brother, who fell through thin ice. The painting was first exhibited at the Prague Academy exhibition of 1824 titled An Idealized Scene of an Arctic Sea, with a Wrecked Ship on the Heaped Masses of Ice, and before 1826 it was called The Polar Sea. The painting was still unsold when Friedrich died in 1840. It is currently held by the Kunsthalle Hamburg in Hamburg.
The Abbey in the Oakwood (1809)
The Abbey in the Oakwood (German: Abtei im Eichwald) is an oil painting by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. It was painted between 1809 and 1810 in Dresden and was first shown together with the painting The Monk by the Sea in the Prussian Academy of Arts exhibition of 1810. On Friedrich's request The Abbey in the Oakwood was hung beneath The Monk by the Sea. This painting is one of over two dozen of Friedrich's works that include cemeteries or graves.
After the exhibition both pictures were bought by king Frederick Wilhelm III for his collection. Today the paintings hang side by side in the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
The Stages of Life (1834)
The Stages of Life (German: Die Lebensstufen) is an allegorical oil painting of 1835 by the German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich. Completed just five years before his death, this picture, like many of his works, forms a meditation both on his own mortality and on the transience of life.
The painting is set on a sea shore and shows in the foreground an aged man with his back turned to the viewer, walking towards two adults and two children on a hilltop overlooking a harbour. The figures are echoed by five ships shown in the harbour, each at a different distance from the shore, an allegorical reference to the various stages of human life, to the end of a journey, to the closeness of death.
The Monk by the Sea (1800)
The Monk by the Sea (German: Der Mönch am Meer) is an oil painting by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. It was painted between 1808 and 1810 in Dresden and was first shown together with the painting The Abbey in the Oakwood (Abtei im Eichwald) in the Berlin Academy exhibition of 1810. On Friedrich's request The Monk by the Sea was hung above The Abbey in the Oakwood. After the exhibition, both pictures were bought by king Frederick Wilhelm III for his collection. Today, the paintings hang side by side in the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
For its lack of concern with creating the illusion of depth, The Monk by the Sea was Friedrich's most radical composition. The broad expanses of sea and sky emphasize the meager figure of the monk, standing before the vastness of nature and the presence of God.
Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1819)
Two Men Contemplating the Moon (German: Zwei Männer in Betrachtung des Mondes) and Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon are a series of similar paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, the setting being among his best-known works. Friedrich painted at least three versions, with one variation featuring a man and a woman. The 1819–20 version in the Galerie Neue Meister is considered the original; the c. 1824 variant with a woman is in the Alte Nationalgalerie; and the c. 1830 version is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
These German Romantic landscape paintings feature two figures in a dark forest silhouetted by a pastel sky. The works' dark foregrounds and lighter backgrounds create a sharp contrast. The sky suggests that there is a solar eclipse occurring. A dead, uprooted tree's dark roots and branches contrast with the sky. The jagged branches and stark contrasts seem to create a threatening environment for the figures, and are reminiscent of the imposing Gothic style seen initially in the medieval era, but revived in the Romantic era. The same can be said of the dark, shadowy trees and rocks surrounding the couple. The figures are dressed in dark colors and stiff, somewhat formal garments, which signify their higher class. The works emphasize spirituality in nature and the presence of the sublime, which are major themes of Friedrich.
Mountain Landscape with Rainbow (1809)
Mountain Landscape with Rainbow (German: Gebirgslandschaft mit Regenbogen), is an oil painting by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, from 1809-1810. Depicting a traveler who has stopped to view a mountainous landscape with a rainbow shining above, the painting was inspired by Friedrich's travels through Germany and along the shores of the Baltic Sea in 1809. Influenced by the Romantic values of subjective experience, Friedrich portrays a figure enraptured by the sublimity of nature.
In 1810, the painting was purchased together with other pictures by Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar. Today, Mountain Landscape with Rainbow is held in the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany.
The Lonely Tree (1822)
The Lonely Tree (German: Der einsame Baum, sometimes translated as "The Solitary Tree") is an 1822 oil-on-canvas painting by German painter Caspar David Friedrich. It measures 55 × 71 centimetres (22 × 28 in). The work depicts a panoramic view of a romantic landscape of plains with mountains in the background. A solitary oak tree dominates the foreground.
An ancient oak stands at the centre of the painting, clearly damaged but still standing. The tree's branches, dark in silhouette, project into the largely overcast morning sky. Banks of cloud seem to form a dome above the tree. The crown of the tree is dead, and the top of its trunk and two truncated branches resemble a cross. A shepherd shelters under the leaf-bearing lower branches. His flock of sheep graze beside a pond in the wide grassy meadow around the tree. In the middle distance, villages and a town nestle among other trees and bushes. Tree-clad hills pile up into blue-grey mountains in the background.
Cross in the Mountains (1807)
Cross in the Mountains, also known as the Tetschen Altar, is an oil painting by the German artist Caspar David Friedrich designed as an altarpiece. Among Friedrich's first major works, the 1808 painting marked an important break with the conventions of landscape painting by including Christian iconography. In the hierarchy of genres, religious (history) painting was considered the highest genre of art; Friedrich's use of landscape to evoke a spiritual message was thus controversial, causing debate between proponents of neoclassical ideals and the new German Romanticism of Friedrich and his peers.
The canvas depicts a golden summit cross with the crucified Jesus silhouetted in profile on a rock atop a mountain, surrounded by fir trees below. The cross, facing toward the sun, reaches the highest point in the picture but is presented obliquely and from a distance. The pictorial space is almost two-dimensional, and by lacking any foreground element, the scene feels distant from the viewer and at a great height. The light from behind the cross darkens the part of the mountain that we see. The low sun may be rising or setting; its five stylized rays travel upward, and one creates a gleam on Christ, suggesting a metal sculpture. Ivy grows at the base of the cross. According to Siegel, the design of the altarpiece is the "logical climax of many earlier drawings of [Friedrich's] which depicted a cross in nature's world" (see Gallery).
Sunset (Friedrich) (1837)
Sunset or Brothers is an oil painting on canvas created ca. 1830–1835 by the German artist Caspar David Friedrich, now in the Hermitage Museum, in St Petersburg, Russia.
The painting depicts two men looking at a seascape during sunset. In this work, as in many others, Friedrich paints the figures seen from behind, so that they are seen contemplating the sea, from the viewer's point of view.
The Watzmann (1820)
The Watzmann (German - Der Watzmann) is an 1824-1825 oil on canvas painting by Caspar David Friedrich, showing the Watzmann mountain as seen from Berchtesgaden to the north-east. It is now on display in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
It was acquired in 1832 by senator Carl Friedrich Pogge von Greifswald, then later by Adolf Gustav Barthold Georg von Pressentin (1814–1879), who lived in Rostock. After von Pressentin's death it was acquired by Martin Brunn, a Jewish art collector who lived in Berlin. Nazi racial laws forced him to flee Germany and he sold it to the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1937 for 25,000 reichsmarks to fund his family's escape to the USA. Hoping to display it in the Berghof, his home at Berchtesgaden, Adolf Hitler granted 10,000 reichsmarks towards the purchase price, but the state considered the painting to be part of the 'Jewish Property Tax' or 'Judenvermögensabgabe'. In 2002 the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and Brunn's heirs negotiated a compromise, whereby the DekaBank was allowed to buy the painting from his heirs for less than its market value (with the Kulturstiftung der Länder as an intermediary) and then place it back in the Nationalgalerie as a long-term loan.