Caspar David Friedrich (5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) was a German Romantic era painter. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes, which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. The human presence in his paintings typically is diminished amid a very expansive landscape.
Friedrich was born on 5 September 1774 in Greifswald, Swedish Pomerania, on the Baltic Sea. He was the sixth of ten children in a staunch Lutheran faith of his father, a candle-maker and soap boiler named Adolf Gottlieb Friedrich. Friedrich had an early familiarity with death; his mother, Sophie Dorothea Bechly, died in 1781 when he was seven. A year later, his sister Elisabeth died, and a second sister, Maria, succumbed to typhus in 1791. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of his childhood happened in 1787, when his brother Johann Christoffer fell through the ice of a frozen lake and drowned.
Friedrich began his formal study in art in 1790 as a student of the artist Johann Gottfried Quistorp at the University of Greifswald, and literature and aesthetics with the Swedish professor Thomas Thorild. Through Quistorp, Friedrich met and was influenced by the Lutheran theologian Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten, who taught that nature revealed God. Thorild also taught Friedrich to distinguish between the spiritual 'inner eye' and the less favourable physical 'outer eye'. Friedrich entered the prestigious Academy of Copenhagen in 1794 where he studied under teachers such as Christian August Lorentzen and the landscape painter Jens Juel. These artists were inspired by the Sturm und Drang movement, and represented a midpoint between the dramatic intensity and expressive manner of the budding Romantic aesthetic and the by then waining neo-classical form. Mood was paramount, and influence was drawn from such sources as the Icelandic legend of Edda and Ossian, and Nordic folklore. A talented student, Friedrich began his education at the academy by making copies of casts from antique sculptures, before proceeding to drawing from life. He was keenly interested in seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, to which he had access at Copenhagen's Royal Picture Gallery.
In 1798, he settled permanently in Dresden. He often drew works, mainly naturalistic and topographical, with India ink, watercolor and sepia ink. It is unclear when he finally took up oil painting, but it was probably after the age of thirty. Landscapes were his preferred subject, inspired by frequent trips, beginning in 1801, to the Baltic coast, Bohemia, the Riesen Mountains, and the Harz Mountains. 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. The paintings of this time were modeled on sketches and studies of scenic spots, like the cliffs on Rügen, and the surroundings of Dresden or Elbe. The studies themselves were made almost exclusively in pencil, and provided topographical information; the subtle atmospheric effects characteristic of Friedrich's maturity were rendered from memory. These effects would eventually be most concerned with the depiction of light, of the illumination of sun and moon on clouds and water, optical phenomena specific to the Baltic coast and that had never before been painted.
Friedrich's first major painting, The Cross in the Mountains, now known as the The Tetschen Altar (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), came at the age of 34. The Cross in the Mountains was an altarpiece panel exhibited in 1808. It was his first painting to gain wide appraisal, yet it was also met with controversy, because for the first time in Christian art, a pure landscape was the panel of an altarpiece. It depicts the crucified Christ in profile at the top of a mountain, alone, surrounded by nature. The cross rises highest in the composition, but is viewed obliquely and at a distance. The mountain symbolizes an immovable faith, while the fir trees represent hope. The artist and critic Basilius von Ramdohr published a lengthy article rejecting Friedrich's use of landscape in such a context; he wrote that it would be "a veritable presumption, if landscape painting were to sneak into the church and creep onto the altar". Rahmdohr was fundamentally asking whether a pure landscape painting could convey an explicit meaning. On the other hand, Friedrich's friends publicly defended him, and Friedrich himself provided his own commentary on the painting in 1809, comparing the rays of the evening sun to the light of the Holy Father. That the sun is sinking suggests that the time when God reveals himself directly to man is past.
His recognition as an artist began with an 1805 prize at a Weimar competition. In 1810, Friedrich was elected a member of the Berlin Academy after the purchase of two of his paintings by the Prussian Crown Prince. Six years later he was elected a member of the Dresden Academy, a position which carried an annual stipend of 150 thalers. of the Setting Sun (c. 1818). 22 × 30 cm. After marriage, Friedrich incorporated larger figures into his canvasses.
On 21 January 1818, Friedrich, then 44, married Caroline Bommer, the daughter of a dyer from Dresden and a gentle, unassuming woman. The couple had three children, with their first, Emma, arriving in 1820. The marriage did not change Friedrich's life or personality (Friedrich was known to be a very gloomy man and received the nickname of the 'taciturn man from the North'. On the other hand, his letters reveal a sense of humour and self-irony, and the natural philosopher Gotthilf Henirch von Schubert wrote that those who knew only Friedrich's gloomy side, only knew half the man), yet his canvasses from this period have new levity. Female figures appear in his work, his palette is brighter, and the dominating symmetry and austerity are lessened. Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, painted after his honeymoon, is a good example of this development.
The artist found support from two sources in Russia. The Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich visited Friedrich's studio in 1820, returning to Saint Petersburg with paintings for his wife Alexandra Feodorovna. The poet Vasily Zhukovsky, tutor of heir to the throne Alexander II, met Friedrich in 1821 and found in him a kindred spirit. Over many years Zhukovsky helped Friedrich by purchasing his work and recommending his art to the royal family, especially at the end of Friedrich's career, by which time he was poor. Zhukovsky said that his friend's paintings "please us by their precision, each of them awakening a memory in our mind."
Friedrich was acquainted with Philipp Otto Runge, another leading German painter of the Romantic period, and gained the admiration of the poet Goethe. He was also a friend of Georg Friedrich Kersting, who painted him at work in his unadorned studio, and the Norwegian painter Johann Christian Dahl. Dahl was close to Friedrich during the artist's last years, and complained that to the art-buying public, Friedrich's pictures were only "curiosities". While the poet Zhukovsky appreciated Friedrich's psychological themes, Dahl attended to the descriptive quality of Friedrich's landscapes. Dahl said, "Artists and connoisseurs saw in Friedrich's art only a kind of mystic, because they themselves were only looking out for the mystic... They did not see Friedrich's faithful and conscientious study of nature in everything he represented".
In June 1835, Friedrich suffered a stroke that caused some limb paralysis. He took a rest cure at Teplitz, but his ability to paint was greatly diminished. He worked only in watercolour and sepia, and symbols of death appeared heavily in his work, such as a sepia with an outsized owl perched on a grave in front of a full moon. By 1838, he was almost incapable of artistic work, lived in poverty, and was increasingly dependent on the charity of friends. His work was considered anachronistic as the Romantic movement gave way to Realism, and his death on 7 May 1840 caused little stir in the artistic community. On the other hand, his works have been rediscovered in the 20th century, and Friedrich's reputation continued to grow into the 21st century.
