Friedrich, Caspar David

Caspar David Friedrich, (born September 5, 1774, Greifswald, Pomerania [now in Germany]—died May 7, 1840, Dresden, Saxony), one of the leading figures of the German Romantic movement. His vast, mysterious, atmospheric landscapes and seascapes proclaimed human helplessness against the forces of nature and did much to establish the idea of the Sublime as a central concern of Romanticism.

Caspar David Friedrich: Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon

Friedrich studied from 1794 to 1798 at the Copenhagen Academy, one of the most progressive art schools of the day. Though he was taught by many painters, the school did not offer a course in painting. He settled at Dresden and became a member of an artistic and literary circle that included the painter Philipp Otto Runge and the writers Ludwig Tieck and Novalis. His drawings in sepia, executed in his neat early style, won the poet J.W. von Goethe’s approval and half of the prize from the Weimar Art Society in 1805. His first important oil painting, The Cross in the Mountains (c. 1807; also called the Tetschen Altarpiece), established his mature style, characterized by an overwhelming sense of stillness and isolation, and was an attempt to replace the traditional symbology of religious painting with one drawn from nature. Other symbolic landscapes, such as The Sea of Ice (1822; also called The Wreck of the Hope; now lost), which makes reference Sir William Parry’s polar expedition, reveal his fatalism and his attitude toward Nature. Though they were based on close observation of the landscape, his works were coloured by his imaginative response to the atmosphere of the Baltic coast and the Harz Mountains, which he found both awesome and ominous. In 1824 he was made a professor of the Royal Dresden Art Academy, though not in the capacity he had wished for. In 1835 he suffered a stroke from which he never recovered, and a second stroke in 1837 caused him almost complete paralysis. His reputation was in decline by the time of his death as the Romantic movement gave way to Realism. For a long time his work was forgotten; it was revived in the 20th century, and the artist’s reputation continued to strengthen into the 21st.