CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH

Caspar David Friedrich epitomises the art of Romanticism like no other painter. The novel relationship between man and nature takes centre stage. Even during his lifetime, Friedrich's landscape compositions were as fascinating as they were irritating. His paintings bear witness to a great inwardness; at the same time, he called for a new pictorial consciousness; the open-endedness of his paintings involves the viewer in the process of interpretation. But Friedrich, whose work characterises our idea of German Romanticism like no other, was not granted lasting popularity. After his death, he received little attention for more than half a century before his paintings were rediscovered and inscribed in the canon of art history as part of the Centennial Exhibition of German Art realised in Berlin in 1906. Today, his works are firmly anchored in our visual memory, and yet they defy unambiguity and can always be reinterpreted.

Caspar David Friedrich was born in Greifswald on 5 September 1774, the sixth of ten children. The old Hanseatic and university town on the Baltic Sea had around five thousand inhabitants at the time and had belonged to the Kingdom of Sweden since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Frederick's youth was characterised by his father's strict Protestant beliefs and a difficult fate. He lost his mother at the age of just six and, in addition to the early death of two of his sisters, in the winter of 1787 he witnessed his brother Johann Christoffer, who was one year younger than him, drown during his own rescue from the icy Greifswald moat - an incisive experience that Friedrich returned to again and again in his later work when dealing with grief and death.

From 1790, at the age of 16, Friedrich began attending the public lessons of the architect and university drawing teacher Johann Gottfried Quistorp at the University of Greifswald. After receiving his first artistic training here, he studied at the renowned Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen from 1794 to 1798 and settled in Dresden, one of the centres of landscape art at the time, in the autumn of 1798. With brief interruptions - stays in his hometown, on Rügen and Neubrandenburg as well as trips to northern Bohemia, the Giant Mountains and the Harz Mountains - Friedrich would live in the Saxon royal seat until the end of his life. The direct study of nature became a key aspect of his work here. He initially produced a large number of drawings, etchings and sepias; it was not until 1807 that Friedrich turned to oil painting. At Christmas 1808, he effectively exhibited his first oil painting The Cross in the Mountains, also known as the Tetschen Altarpiece, in his studio, which brought him much public attention with the harsh criticism of the Prussian diplomat Friedrich Wilhelm Basilius von Ramdohr.

His artistic breakthrough came in 1810 with the exhibition of the paintings Abbey in Eichwald and Monk by the Sea at the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin. Both paintings were acquired by King Frederick William III at the suggestion of the Prussian Crown Prince Frederick William. Friedrich is accepted as a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, and six years later he also becomes a member of the Dresden Academy.

In 1818, Friedrich married Caroline Bommer, almost twenty years his junior, and the couple had a total of four children, the second of whom was stillborn in 1821. In 1824, Friedrich hoped to be appointed head of the landscape painting class at the Dresden Academy, but both artistically and politically, Friedrich was unable to reach a consensus at the time. Instead, he was made an associate professor. In 1826, he travelled to Rügen for a cure - his last visit to his homeland and beloved island. In 1835 and 1836, the artist suffered two strokes that left him almost completely paralysed. He died in Dresden on 7 May 1840 at the age of 65.

After the year 2024 was already fully dedicated to Caspar David Friedrich on the occasion of his 250th birthday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is now showing a comprehensive exhibition of the master painter Friedrich.

Header image: Georg Friedrich Kersting: Caspar David Friedrich, 1811, Oil on canvas, 54.00 x 42.00 cm, Hamburger Kunsthalle