Romantic mist, ruined Gothic, and figures facing the void
Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) set small, silent figures against fog, night skies and Gothic ruins, and became the defining painter of German Romanticism. Goethe championed him early, yet he died forgotten; revived in 1906, tainted by Nazi admiration, he has only been fully restored to honour since the 1970s.
Friedrich was born in 1774 in Greifswald, a Baltic port then in Swedish Pomerania, the sixth of ten children of a Lutheran candle-maker and soap boiler. Death came early: his mother died when he was seven, a sister the following year, and another sister of typhus in 1791. From 1790 he studied privately with Johann Gottfried Quistorp, who took pupils sketching outdoors and introduced him to the theologian Ludwig Kosegarten, for whom nature revealed God.
Four years at the Copenhagen academy, from 1794 to 1798, gave him the royal collection of Dutch landscapes, before he settled for good in Dresden. There he worked mainly in ink, watercolour and sepia, making etchings and woodcut designs that his furniture-maker brother cut, and hardly touched oils until he was established. Trips from 1801 to the Baltic coast, Bohemia and the Harz supplied pencil studies, while the misty light of his canvases was painted from memory.
Two sepia drawings entered in Goethe’s Weimar competition of 1805 won a prize and made his name. His first major oil, the 1808 Cross in the Mountains, showed a crucifix among pines on a peak and provoked the critic Basilius von Ramdohr to protest that landscape was creeping onto the altar. After the Prussian crown prince bought two works, Berlin’s Academy elected him in 1810, but in 1816 he applied instead for Saxon citizenship. He married Caroline Bommer, a Dresden dyer’s daughter, in January 1818, and pictures such as Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, painted after the honeymoon, turned brighter.
Russian support followed from 1820, when Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich took paintings home to Saint Petersburg, and the poet Vasily Zhukovsky kept buying and recommending his work for decades. Even so he died in obscurity, until a Berlin show of 32 paintings in 1906 began his rediscovery.
Source: Caspar David Friedrich
