Caspar David Friedrich (Greifswald, September 5, 1774 - May 7, 1840) was a German Romantic painter, printmaker, draughtsman and sculptor, a great landscape artist. Friedrich is the purest representative of German Romantic painting. His landscapes excel by the symbolism and idealism they convey.
Caspar David Friedrich's Biography
Born in Germany, in Greifswald, which at the time was part of Sweden, he was educated within the strict Lutheran precepts of his father, Adolf Gottlieb, a successful merchant. He lost his mother Sophie Dorothea Bechly at the age of seven, at the birth of his ninth sibling, and was raised by a nanny, Mother Heiden, who was warm to the children.
In the following years she lost four more siblings, one of them, Johann Christoffer, tragically and before her very eyes, falling into a hole in the frozen surface of a lake. Some accounts suggest that the brother was actually trying to save Caspar David himself who would also be in danger.
Such facts marked his life and, added to his strict religious upbringing, are one of the causes ventured for the melancholy atmosphere of so many of his paintings, and contributed to his becoming known as "another of the taciturn men of the north." However, his correspondence reveals a fine humor and self-irony.
In 1790 he took his first drawing lessons with master Johann Gottfried Quistorp at the University of Greifswald, and literature and aesthetics with Swedish professor Thomas Thorild, who taught him the difference between appreciating things with the spiritual eye and the material eye.
In 1794 his father enrolled him in the prestigious Academy of Arts in Kopenhagen, studying with masters such as Christian August Lorentzen and Jens Juel, who were followers of the Sturm und Drang movement. A gifted student, he began his academic learning by copying plaster casts of classical statuary, before studying of the natural. He also had a keen interest in 17th century Flemish landscaping.
Four years later, the family moved to Dresden, the capital of German Romantic literature. Friedrich then made a living drawing pamphlets. He met Phillip Otto Runge and went with him to travel the Alps. When they returned, Runge introduced him to the Romantic artists Johann Christian Dahl, Carl Gustav Carus, Novalis, and Georg Friedrich Kersting.
He also met Goethe, through whom he was able to exhibit his paintings in the city of Weimar, where he won his first prize in 1805. Dresden offered him inspiring landscapes, and because of its proximity to Berlin it was one of the most important artistic centers in Germany.
He worked initially with watercolors and drawings, then began to study metal engraving.
In 1808, after taking a course in oil painting, he was commissioned by the counts of Thun and Honestein for one of his most important works, The Cross on the Mountain, which received less than encouraging criticism, especially from Basilius von Ramdohr, for the artist's boldness in relating the landscape with religious feeling, although it was his first work to have great repercussion.
His friends came out in his defense, and the painter wrote a pamphlet explaining his interpretation of the painting, where the sun's rays represented the light of God the Father and the fact that the sun was setting said that the time when God revealed himself directly to men had passed. It was the only time the author left such a kind of document about his own creation.
Five years later the Prussian crown acquired two of his paintings, Monk by the Sea and Abbey at the Oaks, and he was elected to the Berlin Academy. Visiting the mountains again in search of new panoramas and inspiration, on his return he also became a member of the Dresden Academy in 1816, which guaranteed him an annual pension, and he began working in a studio together with Dahl.
He married Caroline Bommer in 1818, who was much younger, and with her he had three children. Although the marriage did not change his personality, his works gain in lightness, enlarge their dimensions, and the female figure begins to appear prominently. The Cliffs of Rügen, painted after his honeymoon, is a good example of this development.
At this time he found patrons in the then Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich and the poet and tutor of the crown prince of Russia, Alexander Nikolaevich, who met him in 1821, bought several of his works and was a support until the last days of the painter's life, and secured for him other royal clients.
In June 1835 he suffered a stroke, which left him partially paralyzed. He managed to recover somewhat after a season of healing in Teplitz, but his ability to paint was considerably impaired, and he began to prefer watercolor and sepia, in works where symbols of death abound.
By 1838 he was completely incapacitated, and his financial situation became precarious. His works began to go out of fashion and he had to rely on the support of friends to survive. He died in 1840, almost forgotten by the art world. Carl Gustav Carus depicted his death in the painting entitled Tomb of Caspar David Friedrich.
His personality was unpredictable, moving from deep melancholy to lively jocosity. As an adult he gained a reputation as taciturn, but those who had access to his intimacy, such as the writer Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, say that his reserve and austerity were only one facet of the artist, and that he had an unusual talent for jokes and other jokes, as long as he was in a circle of people who put him at ease.
He was friends with Goethe, Johanna Schopenhauer, mother of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, writer Heinrich von Kleist, painter Philipp Otto Runge, sculptor Christian Gottlieb Kühn, and physician, philosopher, and painter Carl Gustav Carus.
Caspar David Friedrich's Work
Caspar David Friedrich was born in a period when the society of Europe was moving from a strong materialistic inclination to a sense of disillusionment, where new spiritual impulses were beginning to make themselves felt. This shift found expression in a reappraisal of the natural world, seen as a pure divine creation, in contrast to the artificiality of man-made civilization.
When he began his professional work he preferred watercolor painting, moving on to oil paintings at an uncertain date, possibly by the time he was around thirty. His favorite subject was landscape, and he made several trips to the Baltic coast and countryside in search of inspiration.
His works often have a nostalgic atmosphere, with mists, dry trees, and dramatic light effects, where he was a master, especially in his mature phase, and where he was an innovator. He made many meticulous notes in drawing for his paintings, which are almost as meticulous as his studies.
The painter Dahl said that artists and connoisseurs saw in Friedrich only a mystic, because they were only looking for a mystic, but did not realize the qualities of faithful and conscientious study of Nature, mirrored in all his output.
One of the most original features of his work is the use of landscape to evoke religious feelings, hence his reputation as a mystic. He sought not only to apprehend nature in a supposedly "objective" way, as the neoclassicals did, but to construct a pictorial narrative that "poetized" nature, making his inspiration a bridge to a sublime meeting between the solitary observer and the external environment.
In his words, "the artist should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. His canvases often depict grandiose skies, storms, ruins, and crosses, witnesses of God's presence. Symbols of death are also not uncommon, such as the boat sailing away from the shore, a motif taken from the myth of Charon, or the dry tree, another pagan reference.
Balancing the sense of abandonment and despair are at other times symbols of Redemption, such as the cross against a clear sky that promises eternal life, the anchor on the beach that alludes to hope, or the crescent moon that suggests rebirth and a progressive drawing closer to Christ.
As the years go by, pessimism seems to gain ground, reflected in darker works of an oppressive monumentality. Typical of this phase are The Sea of Ice and The Wreck of the Hope, which precisely because of their ghastly tone were not well received. From 1830 on, he became almost a recluse, disdaining criticism and painting only for his friends.
The sculptor David d'Angers, who visited him at this time and was impressed by his works, said that he was the creator of a new genre of painting, managing to convey the feeling of tragedy only through the landscape. Friedrich wrote a collection of aphorisms on aesthetics, where he made clear his approach to Nature. In them, he said:
"Close your corporeal eye so that you may rather see your painting with the eye of the spirit. Then bring what you have seen in the darkness into the light of day, so that the work may resonate with others from the outside in.
His patriotism is reflected in the constant allusion to themes of Germanic folklore, and he was influenced by the anti-Napoleonic poetry of Ernst Moritz Arndt and Theodor Körner, and the literature of Adam Müller and Kleist, the latter being one of the first Romantics to write about Friedrich's work.
The death of three of his friends in the battles against France and Kleist's drama Die Hermannsschlacht inspired him to also try to convey political content through landscape, something unheard of in the history of art. Thus was born The Tombs of the Old Heroes, with the representation of the tomb of Arminius, a Germanic captain symbol of nationalism, and four more tombs of fallen heroes, along with two small figures of French soldiers.
Another in this theme is The Forest with the French Dragon and the Raven, where the diminutive figure of the French soldier is lost amidst a dense forest, in a foreshadowing of the French defeat. Friedrich also left some sculptures, where the theme of death is dominant.
Caspar David Friedrich's Legacy
Although he was a renowned painter during his lifetime, Friedrich was not a unanimous critic, and his originality and themes were not always understood. He fell out of fashion even before he died, and his contemplative paintings did not keep up with Germany's mid-19th century modernization drive, and were then considered relics of a bygone era.
His rediscovery began in 1906 with an exhibition in Berlin of 32 works in painting and sculpture. In the 1920s his creations found receptivity among the symbolists and expressionists, and years later among the surrealists and existentialists.
In the 1970s exhibitions in Hamburg and London brought him general recognition. Today he is regarded as one of the icons of German Romanticism, with a body of work of international importance, and one of the best landscape artists of all time.