Published 14 Mar 2021
You can find a video about this artist's work at:
"The Mystic with the Brush" - YouTube
1. The Mystic with the Brush
In 1817 a Swedish poet, Per Daniel Amadeus Atterboom visited the German painter Caspar David Friedrich in Dresden. Some thirty years later, he recorded his recollections of the artist’s manner of work. With painstaking slowness, he wrote, Friedrich daubed the canvas in a way that called to Atterdom’s mind the image of a “mystic with a brush”. Mystical figures and brilliant geniuses were the heroes beloved of Romanticism. Youths with enthusiastic expressions on their faces and dreamy eyes, or artists who died young, conscious of their social isolation packed the portrait galleries of the years around 1800.
Gerhard
von Rügelgen: The Artist Caspar David Friedrich 1806-1809
There is a resemblance to these young men in the portrait Gerhard von Rügelgen painted of his friend Friedrich seen in half-length and with the passion of Goethe’s “Werther” in his gaze
Greorg Friedrich Kersting: Caspar David Friedrich in His Studio 1819
Another of his Dresden friends, George Friedrich Kersting, painted several portraits of Friedrich in his studio in the Dresden suburb of Pirnai, neat the Elbe. In the version now in Berlin, the figure standing in front of his easel is no genius of the Storm and Stress era, but a domesticated husband. Palettes, a T-square and a rule are all that hang on the blank walls. On the bare floorboards, a spittoon. Friedrich, his visitors noted, had banished from his room any superfluous item that might disturb his concentration. One window is shut, the other has its lower half blocked by shutters and only its top half open to the grey blue sky.
The painter who sees no world within himself should give up painting, insisted Friedrich. Only a brief extract is seen of the outside world; for everything else an artist draws upon his imagination, which needs no constant external stimulus. In view of this portrait, we can understand why later writers emphasized Friedrich’s unsociable nature and his gruff exterior, defences which could be penetrated only with difficulty but which, once lowered, revealed a man of disarming amiability.
Around 1805 Friedrich made drawings of the two windows in his studio. Particularly instructive is the view of the right-hand one. The interior is reproduced in strict geometry and with the most economical of means. Standing in the shoes of the artist, whose face can be glimpsed in the mirror cut off by the left-hand edge of the drawing, (note: no ‘face’ can be seen in this drawing) the viewer looks out through the open windows. From the bare confines of the studio, our gaze falls onto the landscape that Friedrich has internalised and transformed into a mental picture.
Just as nature became a key concept in the philosophy of German Romanticism, so landscape assumes a central role in Friedrich’s paintings. Although figures, including some that conceal identifiable individuals, are encountered throughout his work, he appears to have produced no more actual portraits after 1810. One of the last of these – if it can in fact be attributed to Friedrich at all – is the Portrait of a Man, which may depict his father.
Friedrich: Portrait of a Man c1808-1810
The sort of landscape in which Friedrich was chiefly interested, however, was never a simple imitation of nature, but the result of a complicated interplay of visual impressions and mental and notational reflection. Even an apparently topographical view such as the Bohemian Landscape represents a composite landscape made up of several sketches.
Friedrich: Bohemian Landscape c1810-11
Zones of colour rise in layers up to the silhouetted mountain and the delicate yellow sky; “blueing” towards the top. From the two trees in the front middle-ground, the view leaps precipitously into the misty distance. The viewer vaguely identifies spacial depth with movement in thought and even in time. Although such landscapes present us with a “virtual” reality, they never seem artificial, but simply exaggerated in their characteristics.
Friedrich’s pictures are often framed in a firm structure, precise balance, formal constructions and the contrast of verticals and horizontals as indicated by the protractor and T-square hanging on the wall in Kersting’s studio picture. Friedrich was never concerned with naturalistic impressions, but rather with “moodscapes”, with pictorial spaces that resonate in the innermost self. In Friedrich’s own words, a picture must be seelenvolle – literally “fool of soul” - in its effect if it is to meet the requirement of a true work of art. A composition based closely upon life or constructed according to academic rules might be “exemplary”, but will fail to truly stir the viewer.
The Norwegian artist Johan Christian Dahl, who moved to Dresden in 1818, expressed it differently: the majority of Friedrich’s contemporaries saw in his landscapes constructed ideas lacking truth to nature. “Friedrich bound us to an abstract idea..” later complained the painter Adrian Ludwig Richter. “With each passing year Friedrich wades ever deeper into the thick fog of mysticism; nothing is too mysterious or strange for him; he broods and struggles to pitch the emotion as high as possible,” ran one article in another paper. It continued: “Yes’ say his blind followers - ‘one’s imagination is allowed great scope!” This says very little; set up a blank canvas, and one’s imagination is allowed even greater scope.” In an issue of yet another paper, on the other hand, this same freedom of interpretation becomes something to celebrate: “The fact that, in front of the works of this artist, the viewer is obliged to use his own powers of composition in order to fill them out, lends them… a strange fascination .”
Even today, art-historical thinking remains ambivalent when it comes to the difficult question of the message conveyed by Friedrich’s pictures. Can they and should they be interpreted in symbolic or even religious terms? It is best, according to one camp, to contemplate and comprehend them without words, just as the painter himself wished the viewer to do. Any attempt to analyse their moods more closely is uncalled-for. For Friedrich has created examples of typically Romantic introspection and confirmation of the most isolated individualism. Others, by contrast, see Friedrich’s pictorial worlds as works of sublime Protestant symbolism. Others again propose a middle way and insist upon taking greater account of Friedrich’s recognisable links with tradition.
Themes of the sea, harbours and ships play a prominent role in Friedrich’s paintings. Such motifs seem to have touched him deeply. That has led many writers to parade various psychological and religious interpretations, often without pause for reflection. Take, for example, the View of a Harbour, which may have been inspired by the harbour at Griefsvald.
Friedrich: View of a Harbour 1815-16
It is evening and between the masts of the two large ships in the middle-ground appears the crescent of the waxing moon. (Not visible in my copy of this picture.) Beneath it lie thin zones of colour, ranging from light yellow, orange and flaming red to lilac and grey on the horizon; above it, diagonal ribbons of cloud structure the sky. Within the almost unreal space thus created out of colour, the boats themselves are “floating” and seem to be moving forward out of the depths. The two large sailing ships are seen by some as symbolic motifs of departure and arrival. The harbour is thereby the final destination, the last resting-place , while the sky, and in particular the waxing moon, is a symbol of hope. A comparison with Dutch marine painting of the 17th century, however, suggests that such interpretation should be treated with caution. The Seascape by Willem van de Velde, for example, operates with a similar repertoire.
Willem van de Velde c1660
With its central visual corridor, rowing boat and low-lying horizon, it deploys the standard components of a “calm sea”, a subject beloved since the Baroque period with no reference to the world’s end. Friedrich has simply suppressed the details and tautened the composition in the verticals.
Some have also wanted to see an allegory of the end of life and a glorification of the Christian hereafter in Evening on the Baltic Sea, an aspiration that arose towards 1831:
Friedrich: Evening on the Baltic Sea c1831
the boats dragged up onto the shore, beside which two men are warming themselves at a fire, supposedly recall coffins. But Friedrich is here drawing upon an earlier composition of which any such interpretation would be incorrect, namely the painting Seaport at Full Moon, by Claude Joseph Vernet, executed in 1771 and reproduced and widely distributed in the form of engravings.
Claude Joseph Vernet: Seaport at Fool Moon
But while the main motifs of Evening on the Baltic Sea reveal obvious parallels with those in Vermet’s painting, in Friedrich’s hands they evoke an atmosphere of greater stillness, which finds its formal equivalent in a more balanced grouping.
The scepticism that is directed against mystification should not, on the other hand, lead to the robbing of Friedrich’s pictures of all deeper meaning. In the context of Romantic landscapes infused with emotion, the Romantic embrace of the universal sphere and of the affinity, commonly made in Germany at the time, between utopian and religious aims, his pictures possess a fascinating dimension of depth. Thus, while it is true that the painting The Stages of Life deal with earlier traditions in its motifs, it also offers something more and new – namely the various stages of life between birth and death, and the ship as a symbol of life in the “sea” of the world.
Friedrich: The Stages of Life 1835
But while interpreting the content of Friedrich’s works, we should on no account forget his innovative formal language, as demonstrated in the Seascape by Moonlight.
Friedrich: Seascape by Moonlight c1827-28
The ship’s mast here provides the only vertical, placed in the centre of the composition in deliberate contrast to the horizontals of the sea, sky and the strips of light in the water, and in counterpoint to the diagonals of the clouds moving towards the right. However attractive the unearthing of hidden symbols may be, it is also important to recognise such compositional balance, which anticipates many of the principles of geometric and Constructivist abstraction of the 20th century. It is through precisely such structures that Friedrich distils vastness into the unusual – as he is seen doing in this composition.
Which Friedrich is the “right” one – the one portrayed by Kügelgen or the one shown by Kersting? The brilliant visionary or the fastidious technician? In truth he was both. It is illuminating to compare Friedrich’s Self-Portrait, a chalk drawing of c.1810, with the words of the Russion Poet Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky, who met the artist in June 1821
Friedrich: Self-Portrait 1830
and subsequently wrote back to St. Petersburg: “Anyone who knows Friedrich’s paintings of mist and … imagines him to be a contemplative melancholic with a pale face and poetic rapture in his eyes, is mistaken.” Rapture is equally absent from Friedrich’s own drawing of himself around 1810. His eyes are piercing, a little sceptical. His figure, however, seems to be compressed into the lower half of the picture, as if he were looking up at the viewer, which is not the case. His right eye is positioned more or less in the centre of the composition. While the right-hand side of his face is brightly lit, the left lies entirely in shadow, so that it appears threatening. The face contains, as Jens Christian Jensen has pointed out, something schizoid.
Around 1810 Friedrich completed his first masterpieces, which brought him great public acclaim. According to a number of contemporaries, however, by this point in time he already had one suicide attempt behind him. This perhaps fell within the period 1801-02, during which he produced the drawings that his brother Christian would later execute in woodcut. Woman with Spider’s Web between Bare Trees and Woman (with Raven) beside the Abyss – both undoubtedly images symbolic of transience.
But it would be wrong to conclude from these that Friedrich’s work is one of permanent hopelessness. “Death is the romanticizing principle of our life. Death is – life. Life is strengthened by death”, writes Novalis. In the eyes of a Romantic, life on this side of the veal could even improve when viewed from this angle.
One of Friedrich’s best-known paintings is his Woman at the Window of 1822.
Friedrich: Woman at the Window 1822
Caroline Bommer, married to Friedrich since 1818, is the rear-view figure looking out through an open shutter onto the River Elbe below.
Masts and rigging stand out against the section of sky. The viewer is once again struck by the calculated geometry of the composition; it is more expressive than the far-fetched attempt to interpret the subject in religious terms, for example, the window cross as a Christian symbol, the far bank as the hereafter, and even the river as a symbol of death. The studio in which the woman is standing was one that Friedrich had rented since 1820. It reveals the same Spartan simplicity as the earlier studio portrayed by Kersting. Here, as there, nothing is to be allowed to distract the artist from his “mystic” work with the brush. As part of that work, Woman at the Window serves as a reflection of near and far, of a narrow interior and a spaciousness that can be sensed outside, of confinement without the hear and now and a longing look beyond. Elements that recall the famous definition by Novalis: “By giving higher meaning to the mundane, a mysterious appearance to the normal, the distinction of the unknown to the known, the guise of infinity to the finite, I Romanticize it.” Romanticizing became Friedrich’s passion and rapidly placed him at variance with the bourgeois spirit of the age. He nevertheless continued steadfastly down his own artistic path.
Friedrich: Seashore and Fishermen c1807
2. Art is Infinite
Caspar David Friedrich was born on 5 September 1774 in Greifswald, Germany. Friends spread the rumour that his family was descended on his father’s side from a long-established line of counts, who were driven out of Silesia for their Protestant faith and had turned to the business of soap-making in Pomerania; others talked of a Swedish dynasty of counts. There is no documentary evidence either of an aristocratic family tree or any Swedish origins – although Friedrich’s admiration for Sweden is something to which we shall be returning in another context. Information regarding the family’s financial circumstances is contradictory: thus it is recorded that the Friedrich household lived in poverty, yet elsewhere there is talk of a private tutor for the children, which would suggest a modest degree of prosperity. Friedrich’s father was a strict Lutheran who passed on his excessively rigid moral principles to his children. The boy was confronted with death at an early age, when his mother died in 1781. The children were subsequently brought up by a housekeeper, “Mother Heiden”, whom they treasured and loved.
Friedrich's Father Mother Heiden
In 1787 one of Caspar David’s five brothers, Johann Christoffer, drowned while trying to save him after he had fallen through the ice, and in 1791 his sister Maria died of typhus.
Once an important Hanseatic port, Griefswald had fallen to Sweden in the Thirty Years Ware, together with the rest of West Pomerania (the region would only pass to Prussia in 1815). It had long since shrunk to just a provincial outpost on the Baltic and offered little to divert the young Friedrich’s attention from the traumatic events of his childhood. Even the presence of the university failed to inject much life into the small medieval town.
Grieveswald, Germany
But around 1790, however, Caspar David took lessons from Johann Gottfried Quistorp, the drawing master at the university. Quistorp gave Friedrich a solid grounding – including instruction in the field of architectural drawing – and awakened his love of nature and landscape. Quistorp’s own extensive collection of paintings and drawings primarily comprised examples of Dutch and German art. Also at the university was the Swede Thomas Thorild, who as librarian and professor of literature and aesthetics from 1795 until his early death in 1808. Thorild taught that the physical (outer) eye was to be distinguished from what he classed as the superior spiritual (inner) eye – a distinction that would soon become highly important in Friedrich’s thinking and painting, and whose origins lay less in German idealism than in English aesthetics.
In 1794 Friedrich went to study at the highly regarded Copenhagen Academy.
Copenhagen City Centre
He drew plaster casts of classical sculptures and studied Dutch landscape painting in the art galleries of the Danish metropolis. Teachers such as Nicolai Abildgaard, Christian August Lorentzen and Jens Juel represented an artistic trend positioned between classicism and pre-Romantic emphasis upon feeling, and influenced by the “Norse” myths attributed to bard Ossian (in actual fact, literary forgeries of the 18th century). The talented student was inspired both by this enthusiasm for the distant past and by Juel’s carefully composed landscapes. Of the few drawings, watercolours and gouaches that survive from Friedrich’s Copenhagen period, a number already reveal a sensitive eye for nature. Landscape with Pavilion, a watercolour drawing which appeared around 1797, shows a motif from a landscape garden near Copenhagen.
Friedrich: Landscape with Pavilion c1794
The nervous line and the pastel pallet remain somewhat reminiscent of the Rococo. The subject testifies to the emotional emphasis which had always been associated in Europe with the English landscape garden and which in the years 1776-1785, was explored in particular in Danish gardens by the garden architect C.C.L. Hirshfeld.
Friedrich left Denmark with many artistic stimuli. The years in Copenhagen had also introduced him to a spiritual world whose theology was strongly influenced by the mystical vision of nature expounded by the German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. In 1798 Friedrich moved to Dresden, famed for its magnificent art collections.
Dresden
The largely Protestant population was open to the ideas of the Enlightenment - at least until the armies of Napoleon marched in and occupied their city. Friedrich lived in a sparsely furnished house near the Elbe in Pirnai, a suburb settled by families who were not overly wealthy. If a visitor to Friedrich's studio wished to sit down, an old wooden chair would be fetched from another room: if two visitors came, a rickety bench had to be specially brought up.
Numerous drawings survive from Friedrich's early Dresden period, portraying landscapes, natural details and cityscapes. Friedrich's drawing stile matured from hesitant beginnings into confident outlines, fine hatching and a sophisticated handling of light and shade. While his early drawings demonstrate a preference for pen and ink and watercolour, from around 1800 he chiefly chose to work in sepia. Brown sepia ink, used as a wash over a preliminary drawing, demands a subtle understanding of tonal values, and thus contemporary critics immediately recognised the masterly nature of Friedrich's drawings. In View of Arkona with Rising Sun; for example, a large sepia drawing of about 1803, it is almost incredible how Friedrich conjures up an atmosphere of painterly solemnity out of the monochrome ink, which in places becomes almost red.
Friedrich: View of Arkona with Rising Sun c1803
Precisely when Friedrich first experimented in oils remains the subject of dispute. Even if we attribute to him the Wreck in the Sea of Ice, dated 1798 and clearly Dutch influenced, this must remain an isolated provisional attempt, since sepia drawings subsequently continue to dominate his output.
Friedrich: The Wreck in the Sea of Ice 1798
Together with pen drawings, they also make up the majority of the landscape studies executed in 1801-1802 during a visit to Pomerania. It was on this trip that Friedrich saw, near Griefswald, the dilapidated Cistercian abbey of Eldena, whose ruins would run through his work like a recurrent theme.
Friedrich: The Ruins of Eldena c1825
Friedrich was regularly represented in the Dresden art exhibitions of these years and his pictures were given a favourable reception in the art journals of the day. It was nonetheless surprising that they should also find acclaim in Weimar, the capital of German classicism - and furthermore in the art competitions Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had instigated. Even though Heinrich Meyer, advisor to the prince of poets, was arch-conservative in his tastes, in 1805 Friedrich was awarded half the prise for two sepia landscapes. One was the Pilgrimage at Sunset (Sunrise), a delicate landscape drawing infused with devotional intensity, which the judges in Weimar praised as being carefully executed and filled with a beautiful feel for nature.
Friedrich: Pilgrimage at Sunset (Sunrise) 1805
'Elevation of the spirit' and 'religious inspiration' were what Friedrich demanded of a true work of art. His opinion was shared by the members of his circle of friends in Griefswald, which formed in 1805 with the aim of founding a progressive Protestant church art. Friedrich came to believe more and more in the spiritual capacities of art: "Thus man's absolute goal is not man, but the divine, the infinite. It is toward art, not the artist, that he should strive! Art is infinite, while all artists' knowledge and ability is strictly finite." Since art, of course, cannot exist without the artist, it means that infinity can only be grasped in the finitude of artistic ability issuing from the meditation cell of the studio.
Georg Friedrich Kersting in his Studio 1811
Friedrich was now ready to explore this ideal in the medium of paint. 1806 saw him producing an increasing number of commissions in oil. Summer, which today hangs in Munich, unfolds in scenery unusually idyllic for Friedrich and takes as its theme the richness of life.
Friedrich: Summer 1807
The viewers gaze falls in the foreground upon a pair of lovers in a bower, and from there meanders across a broad river valley to the gauzy silhouettes of the mountains providing the back-drop to this earthly paradise. The pendent to this painting, Winter, completed one year later, was destroyed when the Munich Glaspalas burned down in 1931. It depicted a sombre allegory of transience.
Friedrich: Winter 1807-1808 (black and white photo of the original)
Friedrich: Mist 1807
Mist of 1807, which veils all objects, was considered in the 18th century either a metaphor for temptation and distance from God or for melancholy.
Friedrich: Dolmen in the Snow 1807
Whether it may here be interpreted as a symbol of death seems questionable in view of the overall atmosphere, which seems to be brightening up. The Dresden Dolmen in the Snow can also be dated fairly confidently to 1807. The dolmen portrayed here is probably one which stood near Gützkow, and which was removed between 1825 and 1829. Together with his drawing master Quistorp, Friedrich made several excursions to prehistoric sites.
Friedrich: Morning Mist in the Mountains 1808
Morning Mist in the Mountains, painted in 1808, is like a magnificent metaphor for the infinity of art claimed by Friedrich and thus for one of the prime objectives of German Romanticism. No more use of perspective to develop the pictorial space, no internal framework, no development of commonplace themes for variety and no naturalistic local colour. In short, nothing more than an 18th century connoisseur of academic art might admire. In their place we find consummate irritation: a bizarrely cleft mountain top in the morning mist, a scattering of spruce and scots pine and a tiny cross on the summit, barely visible in the haze.
As if he were floating, the viewer occupies no clear standpoint. What message is concealed behind this uniform scenery, and to what extent can references to Christian thought be identified? One answer lies in a comparison with another summit cross by Friedrich in The Cross in the Mountains.
Friedrich: The Cross in the Mountains 1807
The two-dimensional nature of this composition permits an only very limited sense of spatial depth. The few objects within the picture fuse into a clearly delineated elevation. The rocky pyramid rising upwards is not more than a silhouette, and seen against the light the foreground as a whole appears divested of material substance. Here, two, the viewer's standpoint remains undetermined. From the front edge of the painting, the steep slope leads straight up to the summit. Neither path nor human figures are to be found amongst the trees which seem simply to emerge in the shadowy foreground. Behind the triangular mountain, which starts from the left and right-hand corners, of the work, the sun lies low in the sky. It is not possible to tell from the painting whether it is rising or setting. It directs five geometricized rays of light upwards. Three of them disappear into the clouds, while one produces a gleam on the crucified Christ, revealing the statue to be made of metal. The cross itself is located slightly to the right within the composition, its tip almost touching the apex of one of the gable-shaped banks of cloud behind. The base of the cross is wreathed in ivy, twining its way upwards to the statue at the top. The statue's gaze is directed downwards and away from us, towards the sun whose sight is denied to the viewer.
The painting is mounted in a gilt frame that was specially carved by a friend of Friedrich's, the sculptor Gottlieb Christian Kühn. At the bottom, a broad plinth is decorated with the eye of God and the symbol of the Trinity, flanked by vines and ears of corn. Rising to either side are what resemble multiple-rib pillars, surmounted by plain fronds which fuse into a pointed arch and are studded with five heads of angels. Above the middle head, in three dimensional relief, is a silver star.
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| Giant Mountains Landscape with Rising Fog c1809-10 3. Nature as Allegory |
The Cross in the Mountains brought Friedrich to the attention of a wider public. In these politically difficult times, scandal, sensation, admiration and support in print for Friedrich's work carried his name beyond the bounds of Dresden. Probably at no other point in his life did Friedrich enjoy more profound appreciation and greater admiration than in the years around 1810. Two landscapes in particular were responsible for thrusting Friedrich into the limelight. In 1810 they were exhibited as pendants at the Academy exhibition in Berlin, where they were purchased by the Prussian king Frederick William III. These two paintings also led to Friedrich's election as a member of the Berlin Academy. Both Goethe, who visited Friedrich in Dresden in September 1810, and the younger generation of Romantic poets recognized the two compositions as extraordinary works of art.
Friedrich: The Monk by the Sea 1809
The first of the two is The Monk by the Sea, probably begun in 1808, undoubtedly a masterpiece and the boldest work within German Romanticism as a whole. Its composition breaks with all traditions. There is no longer any perspective depth whatsoever. At the bottom of the picture, the whitish sand dunes making up the narrow strip of shoreline rise at an obtuse angle towards the left. At their apex, the tiny figure of a man robed in black is visible from behind - the only vertical in the picture. There is no other living thing. Even the two sailing boats that Friedrich had originally envisaged on either side of the man, he subsequently painted over. The oppressively dark zone of the sea meets an extremely low horizon. Some five-sixths of the canvas is given over to the diffuse structure of the cloudy sky. The aim of this mode of representation, in which different, self-contained layers are arranged one behind or above the other, is to create an innovative, unlimited experience of space, something also evoked by the breathtaking effect of multiple coats of translucent glaze. It is more or less possible to maintain a sense of proportion as far as the horizon, particularly since the man provides something of a point of reference. The scale of the background, however, can no longer be grasped. Because all lines lead out of the picture, infinity becomes the true subject of the painting. In the awareness of his smallness', the man, in whose place the viewer is meant to imagine himself, reflects upon the power of the universe.
A famous description of the painting, evoking a biblical Apocalypse, 'featurelessness' and 'boundlessness' culminates in the striking image that, since the picture has no foreground but its frame, it is "as if one's eyelids had been cut off". Heinrich von Kleist defines the enormous modernity of the painting, which removes the actual artistic creative process into an intermediary realm of the imagination: "What I wanted to find within the picture itself, I found only between myself and the picture." In braving such a step, Friedrich was able to refer in part to precedents in Dutch painting, such as the foreground in the View of Delft by Jan Vermeer.
Vermeer: View of Delft c1660-61
But there, the exposed nature of the figures on the empty shore in the foreground and the unbounded reach of the view to either side are cushioned by the main horizontal of the townscape, which lends them a formal and pictorial stability. In Friedrich's painting, by contrast, the individual confronted by the desolate universe is homeless. Kleist identifies the small figure of a man as that of a monk. Friedrich himself described the figure as a kind of wise man, musing in front of the inscrutable hereafter. However this may be, the figure essentially represents an ideal embodiment of a tragic existence in an unfathomable universe.
The painter Carl Gustav later gave the picture the neutral title of Wanderer on the Sea Shore, and thus named a motif which would continue to surface in painting over the following years, even with the great French realist Gustave Courbet in The Coast near Palavas, for example, would combine the vulnerability of man with the pitifulness of the conscious seeker.
Gustave Courbet: The Coast near Palavas 1854
The pendant to The Monk by the Sea is The Abby in the Oak Wood.
Friedrich: The Abby in the Oak Wood 1810
With its oaks and Gothic ruins Friedrich is probably referring to the pre-Christian era of natural religion and to the Christian Middle Ages. The procession of monks has proceeded past an open grave to arrive at the portal of the church, beneath which stand a crucifix flanked by two lights (not seen here). In 1821 the Dresden, painter Ernst Ferdinand Oehme magnified this motif as if with a telephoto lens, although in his painting the cathedral towers into the sky as intact stronghold.
Ernst Ferdinand Oehme: Cathedral in Winter 1821
In Friedrich's picture the possibility of a better world seems to be revealed only on the pale horizon, on the far side of history and death.
What is amplified in these two canvases is what would categorise Friedrich's manner of composition from how on and what would set him apart from the classical tradition: the elements of a 'negative beauty' begotten by deliberate monotony, explicit repetition, the unmistakeable sound of emptiness within the orchestral whole of the painting, and the strange coupling of proximity to nature and distance from nature. The individual motifs gather emotional hints and produce parallel sensations in the viewer.
The same is true of the beautiful Mountainous Landscape with Rainbow of around 1810.
Friedrich: Mountainous Landscape with Rainbow 1810
Its dreamlike atmosphere results not least from the two light sources at work within the composition: one behind the viewer, i.e. the sun, whose light produces the phenomenon of the rainbow and illuminates the foreground and the figure signifying Friedrich himself, and the other above the top of the arch, in this case the moon, which is breaking through the clouds. Day and night meet. Leaning against the rocks, which may symbolise the unshakeable nature of faith, the small figure of the man is looking up at the sublime natural spectacle and towards the gloomy mountains in the background, from which he is separated by a valley of unfathomable depth. Over the ghostly earth sinking into dark shadow, the rainbow arches as a biblical sign of the reconciliation between God and Man.
Wonderment, reverence and contemplation are the appropriate reactions to the elements of nature. Friedrich is offering us not a realistic portrayal of a geographical region with a walker, but a symbolic landscape whose meaning can be traced back in part to pictorial traditions based on intuition of the 18th century and the writings of Jakob Böhme of the early 17th century.
Friedrich: Morning in the Riesengebirge 1810-11
Morning in the Riesengebirg may be seen as a sort of continuation of The Cross in the Mountains. The subject goes back to sketches that Friedrich made during a walking tour of the Riesengebirg mountains, undertaken in July 1910 in the company of his friend Kersting, even if the overall view does not adhere slavishly to actual topographical reality. The large painting was exhibited in Berlin in 1812, before being purchased by the Prussian king. Reviews of the day compared the strictly two-layered composition and the undulating crests of the mountain ridges with Friedrich's seascapes. The brown rocks in the foreground culminate in a jagged pinnacle surmounted by a cross. This solid mass of rock is separated from the misty mountain ranges in the background by a bottomless chasm. The light strip of the expansive horizon heralds the rising sun. The figure of a blonde, lightly-clad woman is drawing a man to her and to the cross.
These two tiny figures may have been painted into the picture by Kersting, at Friedrich's request. The woman is usually taken to be a symbol of faith beneath the sign of the cross and before the salvation promised on the horizon. The man, who is being guided up to the highest point in this 'landscape of salvation', is thought to be Friedrich himself.
If we compare the Cross in the Wilderness by Fredric Edwin Church with Friedrich's Morning in the Riesengebirge, such links become obvious.
Frederic Edwin Church: Cross in the Wilderness 1857
It is true that, whereas Friedrich's summit cross is a symbol of a landscape redeemed by Christ, Church's landscape is set in Ecuador and strikes a resignedly melancholy tone in its juxtaposition of the wayside cross and the rocky peak standing out darkly against the glowing sunset. In the drawing of the contours of the mountains, and in the sense of infinite breadth and the rejection of all stabilizing framing elements, the two paintings clearly correspond.
The Garden Terrace is a painting of haunting tranquillity.
Friedrich: The Garden Terrace 1811-12
The powerful verticals of the two chestnut trees and the horizontal of the path running parallel to the lower edge of the canvas describe a rectangle in which a woman reading a book, a marble statue and the stone lions flanking the gate are assembled like the elements of a still life. The gate, which incorporates an ornamental cross and behind which a peaceful landscape extends away out of the picture, is the key motif. Beyond its sturdy lions lies the realm of distance and departure, while on this side lies the realm of contemplation, both zones married nevertheless by an exquisite harmony and pictorial geometry.
Friedrich's Winter Landscape of 1811 is characterised by the sombreness of an expanse of snow stretching away into the infinite distance, which modern interpreters sea as a symbol of death, a nihilistic sign of doom.
Friedrich: Winter Landscape 1811
Contemporary critics were more reserved. In one journal the painting was described thus: "A snowy expanse with few interruptions is divided in the simplest fashion into three grounds. The middle ground and foreground reveal a few bare tree trunks, between which stands a man stricken in years, leaning on crutches, who is probably intended as a play upon the winter of life and thus is a kind of emblem of the landscape."
In Winter Landscape with Church, a Gothic church is seen as a monumental vision emerging out of the mist like a phantasmagoria and rising against the gloomy background of a winter sky.
Friedrich: Winter Landscape with Church c1811
Nearer the viewer, a man is leaning back against a bolder and gazing up at a crucifix in front of a cluster of young fir trees. He has flung his crutches demonstrably far away from him into the snow. This combination of motifs has been interpreted as a reference to the security of the Christian in his faith.
In Cross in the Mountains, the rough and rocky terrain of the foreground surrounds a spring, behind which, within an indeterminate space, rise a dark wall of fur trees and the gabled façade of a Gothic church, reduced to a shadowy silhouette.
Friedrich: Cross in the Mountains 1812
A wayside cross marks the boarder between foreground and background. The logic of space and time seems to have been abandoned in this painting in favour of the unreality of a dream.
Friedrich: Neubrandenburg c1817
4. A Journey to Where?
Souring high above the town in this painting, is the slender spire of the Marienkirch. The hilly landscape on the horizon, above which grandiose banks of clouds unfurl into an enormous sky, is the product of pure imagination. This has led some art historians to conclude that the work is not intended as a straightforward painting of a town, but as a glorification of Gothic Neubrandenbirg. The two men on the track in the foreground stand motionless beside what is probably a dolmen and contemplate the cityscape in the distance. Opinion differ on whether the lighting conditions represent sunrise or sunset. Like the bushes shedding their leaves in the foreground, the migratory birds in the sky, probably storks, serve as pointers to approaching winter and by association to death.
Friedrich's Picture in Remembrance of Johann Emanuel Bremer is imbued with infinite and mysterious calm.
Friedrich: Picture in Remembrance of Johann Emanuel Bremer c1817
In its layout the painting recalls the earlier Garden Terrace of 1811/15, except that the atmosphere now appears even more intense, more removed from reality, more solemnly sublime. Appearing within the central garden gate is the inscription 'Bremer'. (Not seen here.) The name refers to one of Friedrich's countrymen, a doctor practising in Berlin who introduced the smallpox vaccination into the city. Friedrich, who had a strong social conscience, knew and admired Bremer, who devoted himself to caring for the poor.
The painting above appeared following Bremer's death in Berlin in 1816. The bare foreground has been interpreted as symbolising the poverty of earthly existence. Like the poplars, the garden gate serves as a memorial and symbol of death, beyond which opens up the hereafter, bathed in the light. Although such an interpretation may sound far-fetched, it does not lie outside the bounds of possibility. In any case, Friedrich here succeeds in creating one of the most impressive atmospheric images of German Romanticism, a nocturnal scene subdued in mood. He also infuses the picture with a harmonious design and an interest generated by the visual leaps needed to bridge the uprights of the pergola and the trunks of the poplars.
In 1818, Friedrich married Caroline Bommer. To judge from her letters, she was a cheerful, humorous Saxon woman whose destiny, like that of her female contemporaries, lay in the narrow confines of a housewife's existence, something already hinted at in the painting Woman at the Window.
Other than that, we know very little about her. She was 25 when she married the 44-year-old Friedrich, who in his letters always addressed her as 'Line'. Whether she was the sister of the supplier from whom Friedrich obtained his pencils, or whether he spotted her in one of the tableaux vivants frequently staged by artists in those days, or whether he met her through Kersting, to whom she was related, are questions that must remain open.
That Caroline was a positive influence is shown by the fact that, from this point on, women appear with greater frequency in his work. A new friendly element seems to enter his pictures. A case in point is the painting to which some writers give the title Woman before the Rising Son.
Friedrich: Woman before the Rising Son c1818-1820
The woman seen in rear view appears as a large silhouette against the intense reddish-yellow of the son. It is difficult to interpret the fervent gesture of her outstretched arms and the stylized rays radiating from the mountains on the hazy horizon, heralding the presence of the hidden sun. Caroline was probably the model for the female figure in old-German dress. Since she is stepping towards the light like an early Christian in prayer, some have sought to interpret the painting in terms of a communion with nature. Friedrich may have drawn inspiration for this motif from paintings and engravings of the 18th century, in particular works of the Protestant and Calvinist tradition, in which comparable figures are portrayed bathing in the morning light. On the other hand, the atmosphere evoked in this painting might be interpreted as an intimation of death, and the boulders scattered alongside the path as symbols of faith. At bottom, few of Friedrich's pictures are as emphatic and almost exaggeratedly symbolic in their effect - factors which make the painting somewhat problematic for the viewer.
Similarly impressive, but much more straightforward in tone, Friedrich's On the Sailing Boat gives the impression that we ourselves are on board, with our eyes directed towards the prow of the boat, where a man and woman are sitting.
Friedrich: On the Sailing Boat c1819
They are holding hands and gazing at the distant city ahead, its church spires and buildings emerging hazily from the mist. A new destination? A return home? The woman is once again Caroline, and the man is probably intended to be Friedrich, who, with this painting is probably referring to the ship of life, to the notion that life is a journey from this world to the next, a familiar theme of Christian pictorial and literary tradition.
The picture is dominated by the emotional span between the narrowness of the boat, the way in which it seems to be gliding soundlessly forwards, strangely without waves, and the longed-for horizon. Dominant, too, is the bold composition with its slightly offset verticals (the mast), its horizontals (the distant shore) and its foreshortened view of the wedge-like front of the ship.
The Chalk Cliffs on Rügen ranks as one of Friedrich's most beautiful paintings.
Friedrich: Chalk Cliffs on Rügen 1818
Painted during Friedrich's honeymoon in the summer of 1818, it portrays the Stubbenkammer cliffs, one of the most popular destinations on the island of Rügen. A grassy strip of solid earth in the foreground describes a sweeping curve between the trees on either side of the painting, almost bisecting the lower edge of the picture a little left of the central vertical. Meeting in the shape of a V at precisely this most dangerous point in the picture, the chalk cliffs rise with a sense of bottomless depth from the abyss below. As if through a window, we look out between two gigantic cliff walls and across several bizarre white pinnacles into a vast ocean whose surface, with its bands of greyish to pinkish blue, demonstrate a different kind of immaterial fathomlessness. This whole lower component of the canvas then evaporates into the delicate breadth of the clear, reddish sky above.
The woman and the two men occupying their bold vantage point in the foreground can be understood in very different ways. Amongst the numerous interpretations that have been advanced, the most convincing is the suggestion that the painting is an emblem of Friedrich's love for his wife and falls into the tradition of Romantic friendship paintings, as indicated by the heart-shaped form of the internal frame described by the grassy ground and the trees. The standing figure in old-German clothes on the right might thus represent Friedrich himself in his idealised youth, directing his gaze towards infinity and the two sailing boats, which probably symbolise his own and his wife's ships of life.
The elderly man in the middle, crawling towards the edge of the cliff like some strange reptile, could be a second Friedrich, now a figure of doubt wishing to determine, cautiously and fearfully, whether there is indeed something interesting to be seen down in the direction where the woman is pointing.
However this may be, one thing is certain: Friedrich is here confronting near and far, comparing them with one another and thus heightening their respective effects. The artist and his wife, on a honeymoon that has expanded into their life's journey, have climbed up to a lookout point that demands an even more courageous excursion: on the one hand, into one's own self, and on the other hand, beyond present and future into a hereafter. The eye comprehends the message conveyed by the ships - a lengthy voyage, a taking leave of the narrow shores of the present and the familiar and a setting sail for the never-ending promise and the hope offered by the far horizon. It is for this reason that the figures have scrambled this far and brought the viewer with them to this exposed spot, where there walk is transformed into an extraordinary experience, during which all they now see between the trees and the cliffs are sea and sky.
Marriage had dramatically changed Friedrich. Whereas earlier he had declared "Is there not an enormous narrow-mindedness and arrogance to the belief that one can and may burden young people with ones views and opinions? he now found a new pleasure in the company of sympathetic friends which helped him to overcome such scruples. From this point onwards people assume a more prominent role in his pictures and become considerably larger. Figures also appear more frequently in pairs, closely bound by friendship of love, etching themselves forever on the memory in images of supreme potency, such as Evening Landscape with Two Men.
Friedrich: Evening Landscape with Two Men c1830-1835
One of the most beautiful examples of such paintings of two figures is Two Men Contemplating the Moon.
Friedrich: Two Men Contemplating the Moon c1819-1820
The men are standing in a rugged rocky landscape beneath an evergreen spruce, symbol of permanence. Friedrich took up the theme again in the painting Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, in which he has perhaps himself and his wife in this scene of romantic fascination.
Friedrich: Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon c1824
In each of these pictures the men are wearing the old German costume that appears in Friedrich's work from about 1815 onwards: a grey or black coat buttoned up to the neck, a wide shirt collar and a black velvet biretta worn over shoulder-length hair.
Old German dress is also worn by the figure in the famous Wanderer above a Sea of Mist.
Friedrich: Wanderer above a Sea of Mist 1818
On top of a dark outcrop of rock, rising steeply in the foreground, stands a man seen from behind. He is gazing across the sea of mist rising from the valley, past the naked pillars of rock emerging here and there into the clear air, and out towards the peaks and mountain ranges in the distance. A bank of clouds lies high above. At the heart of the painting undoubtedly lies the impression of something truly astonishing, as formulated in 1835 by a contemporary of Friedrich: "Climb up, then, to the summit of the mountain, gaze out over the long chains of hills ... and with what emotion are you seized? - You are filled with silent devotion, you loose yourself in boundless space, your whole being undergoes a quiet cleansing and purification, your ego-self vanishes, you are nothing, God is all."
Friedrich's rear-view figure is in all probability intended as a patriotic monument to one who has died (fighting the Napoleonic occupation of Germany). The mist illustrates the cycle of nature. We should remember that Jean-Jaques Rousseau described the purifying effect of the high mountains as the place closest to the 'highest heaven', the fifth element after earth, air, fire and water. Friedrich's 'wanderer of the world' is also looking beyond the mist and mountain peaks into intangible realms, into the divine essence that brings piece to all. The rear-view figure, so typical of Friedrich's work, thus serves as a vehicle of meaning within the composition and at the same time mediates between the viewer and the painting.
The tree of Crows is founded upon strong colour contrasts.
Friedrich: The Tree of Crows 1822
The hillock in the centre of the composition probably represents one of the dolmans on Rügen. The island's bluffs and long narrow reef running far out into the sea are visible in the left-hand background. The bare oak tree with its bizarrely twisted branches goes back to studies made considerably earlier in Friedrich's career. In contrast to the ravaged trees around it, it obstinately stands up to every storm. A striking note within the painting is sounded by the red of the stumps and tree debris, which together with the crows or ravens announce disaster and death.
The artists of Romanticism frequently conceived their subjects as cycles. One of Friedrich's best-known cycles is one depicting the times of day. In it, Morning and Evening were followed a year later by Midday and Afternoon.
Friedrich: Morning 1821
Friedrich: Evening 1820-1821
Friedrich: Midday 1822
Friedrich: Afternoon 1821
Diverging in colour bur similar in format, the paintings at first appear to be portraying simply the changing moods of the landscape at different times of the day. But just how much further Friedrich is looking beyond the pure phenomenon itself emerges from one of his diary entries. In this case, it is the seasons whose changing appearances strike an inner chord in him and which ultimately, in the case of winter, conjure up for him an image of vanity and death. "Today for the first time the normally so glorious countryside cries out to me of decay and death, where before it has only smiled to me of joy and life."
Friedrich: Winter 1807-1808 (black and white photo of the original)
The sky is overcast and stormy, and today it casts its monochrome winter coat over the lovely coloured mountains and fields for the first time. All nature lies before me drained of colour." Friedrich's experience of the landscape immediately before him is blended in his memory and imagination with other similar experiences. What he notes in his diary as his emotionally and spiritually-charged reaction to real impressions, he composes in his painting as a grand cycle of natural destiny. Thus, the expressive character of each landscape fuses with the overall impression of the cycle as a whole into a world order marked by growth and decay - just as the final figure in the series leads back into the first.
Friedrich: Rocky Ravine c1822-1823
In the painting above, the rocks are portrayed larger than in real life, and Friedrich has introduced a deep ravine beneath the tallest pinnacle.
5. Dusk Was His Element
"Dusk was his element" - Thus wrote Carus in his obituary of Friedrich, and thus pointed to one of the cardinal themes in his art: morning and evening, rise and fall, growth and decay, birth and death - in other words, the elementary cycles of life.
It's not likely Friedrich made a lot of money from his art, but nor was he badly off. He continued to produce new works such as Meadows near Griefswald and Boat on the River Elbe in the Early Morning Mist, which offer - beyond all possible symbolism - an undisputed feast for the eyes.
Friedrich: Meadows near Griefswald c1822
Friedrich: Boat on the River Elbe in the Early Morning Mist c1820
Moonrise by the Sea is one of my favourite Friedrich paintings. A contemporary description of this evocative work ventures to say only that two men have clamoured across the rocks a long way into the shallows and appear to be waiting for a ship. Their two female companions are seated more in the foreground. Two massive anchors take the place of vegetation, that is here reduced simply to some saltwater plants.
The vast panorama of Morning in the Mountains has often been interpreted as a vision of paradise.
Friedrich: Morning in the Mountains c1822-1823
Friedrich: Morning in the Mountains (detail)
Opening up in front of the tiny shepherds on the rocky pinnacle, so we assume, is a view down into the dizzying depths below and beyond the track and cliffs into the infinite distance - a view lending an impression of the sublime. Such emotionally saturated imagery, the visual language of atmospheric and 'ideal' painting alike, stood in blunt contradiction to the Realist tendencies emerging in Germany at that time, as seen below in the work of the Düsseldorf School.
Oswald Achenbach (1827-1905): Bay of Naples with a View of Mount Vesuvius
Friedrich emphatically rejected pure fidelity to life, the mere imitation of what lies before the eyes, since "art must issue from man's interior, and depends on his moral and religious work." Only on a few occasions does Friedrich appear to have attempted a more realistic approach, as for example in the unusually dramatic Rocky Ravine seen above. Untamed nature is there portrayed with a descriptive detail that betrays the influence of Friedrich's fellow artist Dahl, who had specialised in precisely such a style.
Friedrich: Village Landscape in Morning Light 1822
The painting Village Landscape in Morning Light also seems fairly realistic at first sight. But the composition is not the product of a single, specific visual impression It is highly artificial, being composed of no less than six individual studies that Friedrich completed between 1806 and 1810. The landscape-format composition presents a plain extending without interruption into the background, seen as if the viewer were standing on the gentle rise that begins in the bottom left- and right-hand corners. From there our gaze falls upon a small pond - to which no path leads - and upon a huge oak tree, which looks at first to be fairly close by.
Friedrich: Village Landscape in Morning Light (detail)
Once our eyes have also registered the diminutive figure of a shepherd leaning against its trunk, however, the tree suddenly appears further away and thus gigantic. Aspects of proximity and distance are permanently chafing against each other throughout the painting so that rational everyday experience is thwarted by visual irrationality. While an idyll on unspoilt nature unfolds around the oak and the shepherd, the village and church spires of the land developed by man are as it were concealed and compressed within a valley by the mountains and the sky high above. All this points to an overall symbolism in which the oak tree monumentalised to the status of protagonist, is a metaphor for growth and decay or for human life in general. Where man entrusts himself to such elementals as the shepherd has done, he is able to establish harmony and peace.
The mystical note struck by this painting is further amplified in Moonrise by the Sea.
Friedrich: Moonrise by the Sea c1882
Evening now replies to morning. The annual sequence subdues humankind to its law. Distances can no longer be gaged in rational terms, so that water, ships, moon and sky open up a dream world extending between yearning and melancholy, between near and far, between this world and the universe. Looking becomes meditative contemplation. No wonder that Friedrich seemed, in the eyes of his contemporaries, to be drifting in such paintings into the realm of mysticism, into a fantasy world which many were no longer able or even willing to comprehend.
In the 1820, the new regime had extinguished the intellectual and artistic fire of Early Romanticism in Dresden. Friedrich, now politically out of favour, would come to feel the change in climate at first hand. When the chair in landscape painting became vacant at the Academy in 1824, Friedrich should have been the obvious candidate. But he was denied the post, on the awkward grounds that the inner compulsion of his genius, rather than thorough study, had made him the artist he was, and that he was therefore unsuited to teaching. By way of compensation, he was at least appointed an associate professor, albeit without a class of students.
That same year produced a painting that may be understood as a sort of programmatic statement and résumé of Friedrich's aims and intentions. The Sea of Ice is undoubtedly one of his masterpieces, yet the radical nature of its composition and subject was greeted in its own day with incomprehension and rejection.
Friedrich: The Sea of Ice c1823-1824
It was disparagingly dismissed as 'tedious': "If only the ice painting of North Pole would melt once and for all," wished one of its contemptuous critics. The painting remained unsold right up to Friedrich's death in 1840.
The sailing ship being slowly crushed by pack ice in a polar landscape otherwise devoid of signs of human life may be understood as a heart-rending metaphor for a catastrophe on an epochal scale, in which visually coded references to ruin but nevertheless to hope, to destruction and to regeneration, combine into a symbolic protest against the oppressive 'political winter' gripping Germany under Metternich. A source of inspiration for the painting was the polar expedition mounted by William Edward Parry from 1819 to 1820 in search of the North-West Passage.
William Edward Parry's second arctic expedition
Friedrich's fascinating painting with its icy pallet corresponding to the Arctic setting, contains an echo of that dreadful episode in his childhood when his young brother fell through the ice and drowned, a tragedy partly precipitated by Friedrich himself. Although the sea has turned to solid ice and organic nature, like the ship, is condemned to death, the light-filled sky and the boundless horizon symbolise, as so often in Friedrich's work, the chance of salvation. In reply to the slabs of ice in the foreground, rising to form a sharp-edged fissured pyramid and gathering within themselves the forces of final destruction, the seemingly weightless and transparent background exudes a solemn calm. Two fragments of ice configured in the shape of an arrow point to the stranded ship. In marrying the terrible with the sublime, the polar world is transformed into a vessel of human emotions.
Closely related to The Sea of Ice and probably painted only shortly afterwards is Rocky Reef on the Sea Shore, which probably depicts the western tip of the Isle of Wight off Bournemouth, a view Friedrich may have known from engravings.
Friedrich: Rocky Reef on the Sea Shore c1824
The rocky needles in the sea recall the ice formations in The Sea of Ice.
By 1824 Friedrich had overworked himself, and developed a complaint to which he refers in only vague terms in a letter of 21 October 1825 addressed to his three brothers, Adolf, Heinrich and Christian in Greifswald: "I have been unwell for a while, but since yesterday my illness seems to be on the retreat. I have just wrapped myself up in furs and sat down at my desk in order to spend the day conversing with you. I have the need from time to time, my dear brothers, to repeat to you how very much I love you and how unbounded is my trust in you, the more my painful experiences cause me to withdraw into myself. But don't let my words give you cause for concern..."
Between now and 1826, his illness prevented him from working much in oil. Instead, he produced chiefly drawings and watercolours of Rügen, which were to be reproduced as engravings and provide a collection of views of the island. One of the most striking of these sheets is the sepia drawing Sunrise over the Sea, in which the sea is portrayed as an absorbing primal element, as it were, from which the sun, with its symmetrical rays, rises and casts its light over the crests of the unending waves.
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| Friedrich: Sunrise over the Sea 1826 |
There is no beach, no shoreline, no ship to define the viewer's position. In an eminently modern fashion, Friedrich reduces his composition to the simplest pictorial means of geometry, colour and light, elements identical to the subject being portrayed.
When Friedrich resumed working in oil following the provisional end of his illness, there lingered a dark shadow which also afflicted his private life - a forewarning of the stroke he would later suffer and which would hasten his death. The motif of the graveyard now began to appear more commonly in his work, as for example in the painting The Cemetery Entrance, which was probably begun in 1825, but which remained unfinished.
Friedrich: The Cemetery Entrance 1825
The imposing gateway is based on that of the Trinitatis cemetery in Dresden. Above the open child's grave in the foreground are the thin, barely visible outlines of hovering figures,
and in the middle of the entrance an angel with outstretched arms.
The two figures leaning against the pillar on the left are the grieving parents.
The same symbolic and heavy sadness imbues The Cemetery Gate
Friedrich: The Cemetery Gate c1825-1830
and the Graveyard under Snow.
Friedrich: Graveyard under Snow 1826
In this painting, the view is reversed: we are now looking from inside the cemetery across the grave to the open gate, which is surrounded by a latticework of bare branches. The stormy sky is dead and empty.
In the latter part of the 1820s, Friedrich began taking up motifs which had previously served as parts of a larger landscape tableau and restating them as absolutes in a new and magnified form. A typical example is his Oak Tree in Snow.
Friedrich: Oak Tree in Snow c1829
Oak trees are encountered throughout Friedrich's work, often in conjunction with a dolmen. They are a personal reminder for him of his native roots and are at the same time charged with nationalist sentiment. The tree here is positively defiant, rising in portrait format against a steely blue sky. For all the stumpiness of its limbs, it is an exclamation mark placed against winter and death.
Around 1830 Friedrich increasingly began to shut himself off from the world, withdrawing ever deeper into his tortured self. He had finally come to realise, moreover, that his art no longer had anything to say to anyone but his closest friends and initiates. He made a virtue of his isolation when he wrote: "It may be a great honour to have a large public on one's side. But it is surely a much greater honour to have a small, select public on one's side."
Friedrich's numerous painting trips never took him far from home. He never visited southern Germany and his painting of The Waltzmann - portrayed below rising like a Gothic cathedral in its stone majesty - is based in Friedrich's words not on 'autopsy', but was inspired by a watercolour of his pupil August Heinrich.
Friedrich: The Waltzmann c1824-1825
Despite its apparent fidelity to nature, the painting reveals a somewhat fantastical element in its mixture of different geological formations and its unnatural ratios of scale.
It is to be noted that Friedrich never visited Italy, the land for which virtually every German artist of Romanticism and Late Romanticism yearned. All the more astonishing, therefore, is the painting Temple of Juno in Agrigenta.
Friedrich: The Temple of Juno in Agrigent c1830
Some art experts attribute this painting to Carl Gustav Carus, on the grounds that the hardness of the line and the steep foreshortening of the architecture are entirely untypical of Friedrich's work.
Friedrich's "final phase of full mastery" was marked by such works as The Stages of Life (discussed above) and The Gross Gehege near Dresden, depicting an area of pastureland crossed by tree-lined avenues just outside Dresden, portrayed in masterly fashion.
Friedrich: The Grosse Gehege near Dresden
Friedrich used a delicate pallet to evoke a particularly solemn evening mood and thus lends a rhythmic impulse to the foreground with rivulets of water glinting in the sunset.
Wreck in the Moonlight condensed typical Friedrich themes into definite statements that stamp themselves indelibly upon the memory with their inner grandeur, their solemnity and their supreme power.
Friedrich: Wreck in the Moonlight c1835
On 26 June 1835 Friedrich suffered a stroke that left him partially paralysed in the arms and legs. After an initial period during witch he was confined to bed, he went to Teplice to convalesce. He was from now on virtually unable to paint in oils and had to restrict himself to drawings. His sepia drawing Landscape with Grave, Coffin and Owl is symptomatic of the obsession with which he tracked death in the last years of his life.
Friedrich: Landscape with Grave, Coffin and Owl c1836-1837
The eyes of the exaggeratedly large, surreal night bird glint in the light of the moon which floats like a halo above the owl's head. The landscape is of "almost insane desolation" (Jens Christian Jensen).
On 19 March 1840, the poet Vasily Zhukovsky visited Friedrich in Dresden, by which time he had probably already suffered a second stroke. The Russian noted in his diary: "To Friedrich. Sad ruin. He wept like a child." Friedrich's greatest anxiety was that he might leave his family penniless. A few weeks later, on 7 May, he died.
Today Friedrich is the supreme composer of stillness. He fashioned fleeting instants which embrace eternity and infinity and which capture a momentary pause between growth and decay and between suffering and action.
Caspar David Friedrich
1774 - 1840
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