Caspar David Friedrich (redirected from Caspar Friedrich)

Friedrich, Caspar David 

Born Sept. 5, 1774, in Greifswald; died May 7, 1840, in Dresden. German landscape painter, representative of early romanticism.

Friedrich studied at the Academy of Arts in Copenhagen from 1794 to 1798. He then settled in Dresden, where he became an instructor at the Academy of Arts in 1816. His landscapes of southern Germany and the Baltic coast depict heavily forested wild cliffs and desert dunes, sometimes with one or two human figures disappearing into the distant horizon in a sunlit or moonlit fairytale setting. Friedrich reveals the uncontrolled power and endlessness of nature and the consonance of natural forces with the moods and impulses of the human soul. A sense of breaking through to the unknown is also conveyed. Friedrich’s landscapes are imbued with profound inspiration, joyous animation, penetrating sadness, or, frequently, remote melancholic contemplation. Stylistically they are distinguished by severity of line, precise rhythm of composition, delicate coloring, and rich chiaroscuro. Examples include Landscape With Rainbow (1809, State Art Collection, Weimar), The Stages of Life (c. 1815, Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig), and Men Observing the Moon (1819–20, Picture Gallery, Dresden). At times Friedrich’s motifs take on symbolic overtones, and notes of sadness and loneliness develop into painful melancholy, a sense of the inevitable transitoriness of everything earthly, and the torpitude of a mystical trance. Such feelings are expressed in Mass in a Gothic Ruin (1819, National Gallery, Berlin), Cloister Graveyard in the Snow (1819, only a fragment is preserved), Shipwreck of the “Hope” in the Ice (1822, Kunsthalle, Hamburg), and Moonrise on the Sea (1823, Berlin Art Museums).

REFERENCES

Azadovskii, K. M. “Peizazh v tvorchestve K. D. Fridrikha.” In the collection Problemy romantizma, fasc. 2. Moscow, 1971.
Sumowski, W. Caspar David Friedrich-Studien. Wiesbaden, 1970.
Börsch-Supan, H., and K. W. Jahnig. Caspar David Friedrich. Munich, 1973.