Caspar David Friedrich: Explore Friedrich’s Life and Artworks

Caspar David Friedrich was a nineteenth-century German painter who drew upon and influenced the Romantic movement. His works most often featured an expansive Romantic landscape with a small human element, emphasizing the dramatic beauty and power of the natural world. Friedrich is widely known for his oil on canvas works, though he also worked with sepias, watercolor, and ink.

Caspar David Friedrich painted over 500 works in his lifetime, including the famous paintings Wanderer above the Sea of Fog and Cross in the Mountains.

Here’s a brief biographical sketch of painter Caspar David Friedrich:

• Early life: Caspar David Friedrich was born in 1774, on the Baltic Sea coast, in Greifswald, Swedish Pomerania, in modern-day Germany. He lost many family members during his childhood—his mother, two sisters, and one younger brother passed away before Friedrich turned 14.
• Art studies: In 1790, Friedrich began to study art at the University of Greifswald under artist Johann Gottfried Quistorp. During this time, Friedrich started learning to sketch from life, often exploring the outdoors as a source of artistic inspiration. He later entered the Academy of Copenhagen, studying under artists Christian August Lorentzen and Jens Juel, and eventually settled in Dresden. In 1805, he won the top prize at the Weimar competition, establishing himself as an up-and-coming painter.
• Moderate success: In 1808, Friedrich finished his first major work, entitled Cross in the Mountains. In the following years, he painted several notable pieces, including Wanderer above the Sea of Fog and Chalk Cliffs on Rügen. However, he didn’t enjoy much commercial success—while certain artists (like Philipp Otto Runge) admired his work, the public regarded his paintings without much enthusiasm. With the decline of Romanticism and the rise of Realism, Modernism, and other movements, Friedrich’s work fell into obscurity in his later years.
• Rediscovery: Friedrich’s work inspired a handful of painters after his death. In 1906, Friedrich began to achieve posthumous fame after some of his paintings were displayed in a Romanticism exhibit in Berlin. He’s now cited as one of the most important German artists and a major influence for creators such as painter Johan Christian Dahl, writer Samuell Beckett, and painter Mark Rothko. His work can be seen in the National Gallery, the Hermitage Museum, the Kunsthalle Hamburg, the Alte Nationalgalerie, and the Museum der Bildenden Künste.

Caspar David Friedrich’s work significantly influenced the Romantic movement and beyond:

• He established landscape as a major subject. Before Caspar David Friedrich, few Western artists were creating landscape paintings—the subject of landscape wasn’t considered a major genre. With the rise of Friedrich’s work—both his pure landscape paintings and his landscapes featuring small human elements—landscape and nature painting finally became a recognized genre within the Western canon.
• He reinvented landscape through the sublime. Caspar David Friedrich was an innovative landscape painter, featuring landscapes in an entirely new way than his predecessors and contemporaries. Friedrich’s paintings look at the landscape through a lens of the “sublime,” a term in art and philosophy that describes connecting with the spiritual self. Friedrich’s landscapes are often described as expansive, grand, and awe-inspiring, sometimes even slightly fear-inducing, encouraging the viewer to reunite with their spiritual side.
• He paved the way for the Symbolist movement. Caspar David Friedrich often included symbols or allegorical elements in his landscape paintings—for example, including a Christian cross atop a mountain and rays of sunlight behind it. These symbols heavily inspired the Symbolist movement, and Symbolist painters like Norwegian artist Edvard Munch often cited Friedrich as a significant influence.

Caspar painted more than 500 pieces during his lifetime. Here are a few of his most well-known works:

1. 1. Cross in the Mountains (1808–1809): Also called the Tetschen Altar, this work is an altarpiece that was likely commissioned for a family chapel. The painting features a cross atop a mountain in a landscape setting.
2. 2. The Abbey in the Oakwood (1808–1810): This painting is in dialogue with Gothic art, depicting a group of monks carrying a coffin past a ruined church and a stand of barren trees.
3. 3. Morning in the Riesengebirge (1811): This painting features a barely visible cross within a mountain setting, surrounded by morning mist and clouds.
   
4. 4. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818): Arguably Friedrich’s most well-known painting, this work (also called Sea of Mist), features a man standing atop a cliff, looking down at an impressive and sublime expanse of morning mist.
5. 5. Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (1818): Friedrich painted Chalk Cliffs on Rügen to commemorate his marriage to Christiane Caroline Bommer. The painting features a trio of people enjoying the view of the ocean through majestic chalk cliffs—the mood of this painting is unusually cheerful compared to much of the rest of Friedrich’s work.
6. 6. Moonrise over the Sea (1822): In this painting, Friedrich depicts a group near the sea, lit by moonlight. Human presence figures more prominently in this piece than in Friedrich’s previous painting—many scholars suggest this is due to his marriage and the birth of his children, making family life a more important aspect in his work.
7. 7. The Sea of Ice (1823–24): Also called The Polar Sea, this painting depicts a ship that has wrecked upon a frozen, rocky seashore.
8. 8. Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (1824): This painting, one part of a three-painting set (along with two versions of a painting titled Two Men Contemplating the Moon), features two dark figures standing in a murky forest, looking at a pastel sky at dusk.

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