Caspar David Friedrich - Life, Works, Quotes, Selected works

Painter, born in Greifswald, NE Germany. He studied at the Academy of Copenhagen (1794–8), then settled in Dresden. His work portrays landscapes as vast and desolate expanses in which people, often seen as solitary figures, are depicted as melancholy spectators of Nature's power. He taught at the Dresden Academy from 1816, and became a professor in 1824.

Caspar David Friedrich (September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840) was a 19th century German romantic painter, considered by many critics to be one of the finest representatives of the movement.

Life

He was born in Greifswald.

He studied at the Academy in Copenhagen (1794-98), and subsequently settled in Dresden, often traveling to other parts of Germany.

Some of Friedrich's best-known paintings are expressions of a religious mysticism. Friedrich painted several other important compositions in which crosses dominate a landscape.

Even some of Friedrich's apparently nonsymbolic paintings contain inner meanings, clues to which are provided either by the artist's writings or those of his literary friends.

Works

After the development of sepia drawings and watercolours (mainly naturalistic and topographical), Friedrich took up oil painting after the age of thirty. In his time this work was not unanimously accepted for the principal role of landscape in a religious subject, however, this was his first appraised painting.

His famous morbidly romantic painting "Mönch am Meer" (Monk by the Sea) impressed Karl Friedrich Schinkel (later Prussia's most famous classicist architect) so much that he gave up painting and took up architecture, much to the benefit of German and world architecture.

Friedrich's masterpieces were almost forgotten by the general public in the second half of 19th century and only at the end of 19th and beginning of 20th century he was rediscovered by Symbolist painters for his visionary and allegorical landscapes.

Adolf Hitler would later cite Friedrich's work as expressing the Aryan ideals and co-opted a painting as a cover for Nazi propaganda, making some contemporary critics and art historians reluctant to promote Friedrich's work.

As well as other romantic painters like J. Turner or John Constable he made landscape painting a major genre in western art. Friedrich's style influenced the painting of the Norwegian Johann Christian Dahl but the successors of his painting style did not achieve his mastery and depth. Arnold Böcklin was strongly influenced by his work and perhaps also the painters of the American Hudson River School, the Rocky Mountain School, and the New England Luminists.

Friedrich also sketched monuments (a memorial) and sculptures for mausoleums, which reflects his obsession with death and afterlife, and some funereal art in Dresden's cemeteries are his.

Quotes

"The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself.

"A mountain of ice and the debris of a ship that has been crushed by it.

Selected works

Tetschen altar (c.1807) - Oil on canvas Cross on the mountain (ca. 1810) - Oil on canvas -Kunstmuseum at Dusseldorf, Germany Cloister Graveyard in the Snow (1810) - Oil on canvas, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany Winter landscape (1811) - Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London.