Friedrich, Caspar David

Friedrich, Caspar David (käs`pär dä`fēt frē`drĭkh), 1774–1840, German romantic landscape painter. After studying painting in Copenhagen he visited various scenic spots in Germany and chose to live in Dresden, where he remained until his death. Friedrich's melancholy and symbolic compositions were singular expressions of the significance of landscape. His use of unusual, often eerie, light effects unified the mood of his works. His approach was a solitary one and his influence was not great, although he taught from 1816 until his death. Such works as Capuchin Friar by the Sea, Man and Woman Gazing at the Moon (both: Berlin), and Two Men Contemplating the Moon (c.1830, Metropolitan Mus. of Art, New York City) typically project his mystical and pantheistic attitude toward nature.

Bibliography

See studies by H. Börsch-Supan (1974) and S. Rewald (2001).

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Friedrich, Caspar David

(born Sept. 5, 1774, Greifswald, Pomerania—died May 7, 1840, Dresden, Saxony) German painter. He studied at the Copenhagen Academy. After 1798 he settled in Dresden and began his career as a topographical draftsman in pencil and sepia wash. His first important oil painting, The Cross in the Mountains (1807–08), achieves an overwhelming sense of isolation. In 1824 he was appointed professor at the Dresden Academy. His vast, mysterious landscapes and seascapes, proclaiming human helplessness against the forces of nature, did much to establish the sublime as a primary focus of Romanticism. Interest in his work revived with the rise of Symbolism at the beginning of the 20th century.

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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.